Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

300 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
South African playwright Athol Fugard cowrote The Island with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, who played
the two roles—of convicts at hard labor in South Africa’s brutal Robben Island prison—in the play’s 1973 Cape Town
premiere and in London and Broadway showings the following year, which attracted international attention to the play
and, in New York, earned Tony Awards for the two actors. Here Kani and Ntshona repeat their roles in a 2003 revival at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music. © Richard Termine
but America that needs to catch up,” said Senior Editor
Randy Gener in a 2007 cover story on Romanian theatre
for American Theatre, the country’s most distinguished
publication in that field.
Each of those Romanian directors has reinvented the
theatre itself by questioning the way it works, the way it
thinks, and the way it projects ideas and images to its audiences.
Each has worked frequently in Europe, Asia, and
the United States. Serban directs regularly at the American
Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
teaches at Columbia University in New York. Purcarete’s
internationally renowned work includes a magnificent
Faust, which received once-in-a-lifetime reviews when
on tour at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Tompa and
Maniutiu (respectively) head the Hungarian-language and
Romanian-language national theatres of Cluj, where both
of those languages are spoken; each also now teaches and
directs at University of California campuses at, respectively,
San Diego and Irvine. All four also continue to
direct in their home country, where they face increasing
competition from a new generation of Romanian disciples
who are actively building on their discoveries.
Romanian theatre is intellectually bold, stylistically
innovative, physically demanding of its performers, and
emotionally demanding of its audiences. There is no
doubt that Gener’s estimate of Romania’s importance to
the theatre’s future is accurate; the entire Spring 2009
issue of Yale University’s Theater journal was also
devoted to Romanian theatre today, and the international
festivals Romania now hosts annually in Bucharest, Cluj,
Craiova, and Sibiu are attended by theatre practitioners,
students, and fans from all over the world.
And for those readers—the vast majority, of
course—who aren’t making foreign theatre tours this