Memories of Romania : A Director’s Interpretation of ‘The Dragon’ on a Hollywood Stage Represents His Link to Fellow Countrymen in a Repressed Homeland

“Here, let me show you something,” says director Florinel Fatulescu, almost conspiratorially, as he reaches into his briefcase.

Sitting at an outdoor cafe on Vermont Avenue with Rodica, his musical collaborator, occasional translator and wife, he carefully pulls out an envelope and hands it to a visitor. What catches the eye isn’t the French stamp or Paris postmark, but the addresser’s name, in big, typed letters: E. IONESCO.

The internationally acclaimed playwright and progenitor of the Theatre of the Absurd, Eugene Ionesco, had seen a videotape of Florinel Fatulescu’s production of “The Chairs” staged at Friends and Artists Theatre Ensemble in Hollywood. He wanted to let the director know how much he admired the fresh version of his comedy, especially the enthusiasm of the young cast.

For Fatulescu, 41, this means more than kind words from an idol. It’s a connection between fellow Romanian artists in exile, sometimes lonely in the West, haunted by terrible memories of a savagely repressed homeland.

It’s the memories of Romania--and the letter--that have fueled Fatulescu’s ambitions to stage Yevgeny Schwartz’s dramatic fable, “The Dragon,” at Friends and Artists (running indefinitely).

Yet, the director notes ironically that during his 1990 return trip to visit his mother in Romania, “I realized that my home was now in America, because I was having memories of this place.” He also realized that, despite the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu’s ruthless Communist regime, little had changed.

“If anything,” he remarks, his dark eyebrows rising in emphasis, “things were worse. Romanians needed a tyrant.”

The notion came to him of reviving Schwartz’s 1943 fairy tale of villagers caught in the same predicament: A ferocious but wily dragon has ruled the people by terror for 400 years, but even when the knight Lancelot slays the beast and apparently liberates the village, the dictatorial mayor--a human “dragon”--takes over.

According to the Fatulescus, the old Romanian communists were swept aside for the new ones, despite the seeming appearance to Western eyes of a democratic revolution echoing those in the rest of Eastern Europe. Schwartz’s prophetic comedy, at least as Romania is concerned, is bitterly precise.

“Of course, Schwartz’s subject was communism,” Florinel Fatulescu says, “but he had to dress it up in a fairy tale.” Indeed, Schwartz wrote almost exclusively in the fairy-tale form, an ideal metaphoric refuge in which to create pointed political satire.

Fatulescu, as with any good communist-era artist, applied Schwartz’s same tactic, but in different ways. “For 15 years as a state-supported theater maker, I used what I might call ‘covers’ to lay over the messages of the plays, and the audiences knew how to read through these and enjoyed playing along.”

So too, apparently, did the state authorities (“Many of them were very, very smart, and knew what he was doing,” Rodica Fatulescu notes.) Along with the critics, they awarded Florinel 11 prizes, elevating him to the top tier of his profession.

Fatulescu mirthfully recalls the multiple tactics he would use to finesse sensitive material past the bureaucratic trapdoors. After gaining modest fame running a regional theater in a mining region near the city of Timisoara, “playwrights would send me their work. We would go through it and make some cuts so it would seem palatable to the party’s man attached to whatever theater I was at. It wouldn’t be all the cuts he would have required. But when I pitched him the play, I put it in this acceptable framework, even though it was actually a very rebellious play. And then I staged it in my own way!

“Sometimes, the audiences would have such fun with a production that one of the officials would come up to me during intermission and request that the show be shut down. ‘How can I?,’ I would say to him, waving my hand around the theater, ‘There are 800 people here.’ He would back down. The next production, though, I was a good boy. I did not press my luck.”

Still, for both Fatulescus, arrest was never too far away from their minds. “It was a cat-and-mouse game,” Rodica Fatulescu says, in which artists knew just how far to go--and no further. From 1965 to 1970, in the early days of Ceausescu’s rule, the repression was relatively mild. Then, she remarks, slowly “the screws were turned. Today, there were no cigars; tomorrow there would be no sugar, after that no cheese, and eventually no electricity after 10 in the evening. There would be only two hours of nightly TV, which of course shut off at 10--and one of those hours would always be devoted to Ceausescu.”

Her husband adds, “This is why people came to the theater, since TV and movies barely existed.” He gave his hungry audiences a steady supply of everyone from Shakespeare to Beckett, as well as the best contemporary Romanian playwrights, such as Marin Sorescu (whose “Vlad Dracula the Impaler,” about the actual violent hero of Transylvania, Fatulescu is now pitching around town).

Worn down by years of playing Elude the Censors, the Fatulescus applied for U.S. passports in 1986. That same year, two of Florinel’s productions were invited to Poland (where he couldn’t go because of his passport application), and his production of a Romanian play, “The Ark of Good Hope,” went on without his name on the credits.

“It was absurd, of course,” Fatulescu says, “because everyone knew I was the director. Romania didn’t want any artists or intellectuals. Like our friend, the pipe player Zamfir, told us, ‘I was given exile, I didn’t choose it.’ ”

Rodica’s parents lived in Los Angeles, where the Fatulescus arrived in 1987. “America was a different planet, the culture shock was that much for us,” recalls the director. “I was scared, but I told myself that as long as there was theater here, I wasn’t alone. A theater is like a church for me.”

The couple surveyed the massive L.A. scene; what they found were naturalistic dramas that didn’t interest them, or worse, thoughtless versions of their hero, Ionesco.

One day, they spotted a notice for Peter Weiss’ “Marat/Sade” at Friends and Artists. So impressed was Florinel that he introduced himself to Friends and Artists co-founder Sal Romeo. Soon, Fatulescu was in rehearsals with Nikolai Erdman’s black Soviet comedy, “The Suicide,” for which he won a Drama-Logue award for artistic achievement.

As with “The Suicide,” “The Dragon” was banned in the U.S.S.R. until glasnost . And in both cases, Fatulescu found himself having to adapt his directing ways to his young American actors.

“You know those clever little ‘covers’ I used to disguise my productions in Romania? Suddenly, I don’t need them here. Everyone is so open. In some ways, American actors are better-equipped than Eastern European actors because they’re more instinctive, spontaneous. I speak to them a lot during the first week about the characters but then, I leave them alone to find their way,” he says. When her husband speaks with the actors on characters, Rodica Fatulescu often pitches in on translations, although less so with the newest show, she says.

He will offer his own interpretation of “The Dragon’s” symbolic archetypes (“Oh yes, well, the mayor is Stalin, and Lancelot is glasnost “), and even though his own dark additions to the play’s ending also suggest the return to totalitarianism, he’s loath to impose messages on the audience.

Fatulescu attempts to find the balance between fairy-tale resonances and political suggestions, exemplified by designer Robert W. Zentis’ fancifully elaborate water machine, at which the villagers labor to provide magic water to feed the dragon.

“It’s very funny for me as a Romanian--since I know my own people would automatically pick up on the play’s metaphors--to hear somebody talking after the show, really entertained, but wondering to the person they’re with, ‘Now, didn’t there seem to you that there was something political going on?’ ”

What a country.