by Vlad Zografi
director:
Emanuel Petran
Cast:
Emanuel Petran
Diana-Ioana Licu
Extras:
Florin Ivănușcă, Nicolae Olt
For most people, illness is an abnormality, a limit to one’s freedom of action, while prolonged illness is a catastrophe. For Vlad Zografi’s character, however, the opposite is true: illness becomes a normal, constant state, with leprosy being the ultimate disease; the protagonist is freed from all the constraints of a stifling existence, filled with intensive medical and affective care. The leper is marginalised and rejected by everybody, having to deal with a society which is afraid of anything contagious or incurable. But this time, the patient is free to rebel, to seek revenge on those who didn’t actually harm him in any way but rather tried to help him. Distance becomes a sort of arme blanche. This is the paradox and the dramatic core of the play: subjectivity, the sense of injustice and the implicit legitimisation of revenge by seizing what is not ours to take but which can always be justified. The character takes us with him on a delirious voyage, in the whirlwind of his thoughts, memories and projections, just like an actor who is constantly reshaping his dramatic environment, while also reinventing his interlocutors.
Ștefana Pop-Curșeu
Opening date: Friday, September 9 2022
"Euphorion" Studio
12+
1h 10 min.
Emanuel Petran finds an unpredictable solution for this monologue. He designs a tessellated profile for his character, multiplying his characteristics, which range from honesty to rebellion, from simplicity to the complexity of contradictory moods, from seething anger to a hurt ego, the need to communicate with other people and an obsession with being a part of the world order. This is a tragic character, embittered by frustration, who is still awaiting the harmony he was unjustly denied. The actor develops these traits with empathy, drawing on his expertise. The director proves his maturity and resourcefulness, exploring a dramatic theme in line with his artistic temperament.
Adrian Țion, Explorare regizorală subiectivă în monodrama Sărută-mă (A Director’s Subjective Explorations in the Monodrama Kiss me),
In the newspaper Făclia, Wednesday, September 14th 2022
Vlad Zografi was born in Bucharest in 1960. He studied Physics at the University of Bucharest, and in 1994 he got his PhD in Atomic Physics at the University of Paris XI, Orsay. He made his debut in February 1990 in România literară, with a short story. Since then, he has published prose (Genunchiul stâng sau genunchiul drept / The Left Knee or the Right Knee, 1993; Omul nou / The New Man, 1994), then plays: Isabela, dragostea mea / Isabela, My Love (1996, The Writers’ Union Award), Oedip la Delphi / Oedipus in Delphi (1997), Regele şi cadavrul / The King and the Corpse (1998), Viitorul e maculatură / The Future is Gubbins (1999, The Writers’ Union Award), America şi acustica / America and the Acoustics (2007, The Writers’ Union Award), Petru (2007, which includes revised versions of previously published plays), Toate minţile tale / All of Your Minds (2011). Petru was the first play to be staged after 1989 at the North Theatre of Satu-Mare and then at the Bulandra Theatre (directed by Cătălina Buzoianu; the show was also part of the Bonn Biennale in 1998, as a guest performance). In 2012, Zografi published the essay Infinitul dinăuntru. Șase povestiri despre om, societate și istorie / The Infinity Within. Six Tales about People, Society and History. In 2016, he published the novel Efectele secundare ale vieții / The Side Effects of Life (The Observator Lyceum Award, 2017), which was also translated into Czech (by Jiři Našinec, Havran Publishing House, Prague, 2019) and Serbian (by Ðura Miočinović, Knjževna radionica Rašić Publishing House, Belgrade, 2020). In 2018 he published the novel Șapte Octombrie / October 7th.
(The biography was first published on the Humanitas website)
Educated and specialized in the field of exact sciences, Vlad Zografi has always wanted – as he claimed in an interview – to write, but “since being a writer was not a job”, “unless you became a bestselling author, which I am not, nor did I want to be”, he thought of becoming a journalist; however, in his own words: “journalism was not a right fit for me, I am slow to react and keep daydreaming”. After getting a PhD in Physics in Paris, others might have been tempted to never return to Romania, but Vlad Zografi did not want to remain in France for a very simple reason: he can only write in Romanian and he perceives his native language as “an internal organ which cannot be transplanted”. The writer lives “fiercely in the intimate space of the Romanian language”.
Zografi’s latest dramatic volume, Toate mințile tale/All of Your Minds, dates back to 2011. Since then, he has devoted himself to prose, as he felt that “he had said all there was to say” in the field of theatre. In his words, the time “when I wrote for the theatre has clear limits, from which I have walked away”. Even though “there is a lot of playfulness” in his writing, for him “writing is not a whim, I don’t try out one thing or another just for the sake of it, if I write something I have to be certain that there is indeed something at stake, I have no time or energy to waste”. Zografi believes that “writing is a bizarre combination of rigour and mania”. He wrote his plays “starting from certain thoughts which kept growing and certain nuclei which coagulated other thoughts, until everything came together and generated something resembling a play”.
Although his work as a writer and editor takes up most of his time, Zografi is also a fierce political commentator. It all has to do with being a responsible member of today’s society, “out of spontaneous revolt”, whenever he witnesses “unacceptable things”.
In the interview mentioned above (https://www.forbes.ro/articles/vlad-zografi-arhitectura-unei-cariere-112884), Raluca Juncu asked the following question: “How does the playwright feel when he is in the theatre hall, watching the premiere of one of his plays?”. Zografi admitted that “it is a strange feeling, you see yourself in what is happening on stage, yet you don’t quite recognize yourself. Those are your words, but they are interpreted from a different perspective, you even discover certain things that you put in the text without realising it – which is good. You always compare the performance you had in mind while writing with the performance taking place before your own eyes. In ’97, Petru was performed at the Theatre of Satu-Mare. I remember being happy and dizzy – it’s a memory which I have locked away, far, far away in the past”.
By Eugenia Sarvari
The monologue Kiss Me was published in the volume Viitorul e maculatură (Humanitas, 1999). The first performance - the absolute premiere - took place at the National Theatre of Cluj-Napoca on November 21st 2001. It was directed by Ovidiu Caița. It was restaged in 2011, when it was directed by Victor Olăhuț.
The play tells the story of a leper, a marginalised man, living at the periphery of life, who enters the messy home of a random person, although lepers are generally banished from society and may not seek shelter inside city walls; they are supposed to flee society, and, if someone approaches them, they must yell from afar "unclean, unclean". From the character's story, we learn that he has received excessive care ever since he was a child, because he was constantly ill. Then, he was coddled by his wife, who then died, following a cancer diagnosis. His story unfolds almost cinematographically. We become familiar with the stages of degradation and isolation, with the gradual descent into an existential ravine, because of this sudden illness, caught randomly, obliviously, which drove him away from people and led him to the precarious life of a homeless man. Eventually, the leper becomes the master of this house which is not in fact his, invading somebody else's property; he seizes this house in the most determined manner, aiming for revenge: revenge on the situation? on other people? on their hypocrisy? or perhaps all of the above, at the same time.
In the Bible, there are multiple references to lepers being healed. For instance, Matthew 8,1-3: "When Jesus came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him. And then a leper approached, did him homage, and said, ‘Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean. He stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, ‘I will do it. Be made clean.' His leprosy was cleansed immediately." Luke also writes about the healing of the ten lepers. Only one of them was grateful to Jesus for this miracle. The other nine did not come back to thank him. Also, right after his conversion, Francis of Assisi met a leper whom he kissed out of love for Jesus. An act of love, carried out due to his strong faith: "Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong" (2Cor 12,10). Only He granted his followers the power to "tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon the full force of the enemy and nothing will harm you" (Luke 10,19).
In a stirring scene from Risen, a film by Kevin Reynolds, the Roman tribune Clavius (Jospeh Finnes) is charged with solving the mystery of Jesus's resurrection. During this investigation, he is amazed to see Jesus hug a leper. Freeing himself from the hug, the man walks away. Then, looking back at one point, he shows his face - clean, healed. His scabs had fallen off; it made him believe in Jesus and fear nothing any more, unlike Peter, who, losing eye contact with Jesus for a second, was no longer able to walk on water. "Be not afraid" (Matthew 10,31) is Jesus's command!
"The kiss of the leper" should constitute a lesson for all of us. But when the leper in the play enters a church - out of a legitimate desire to seek salvation through spirituality - and asks the priest to kiss him, the priest falls short of his expectations and avoids him, getting lost in the crowd. This decision is perceived by the leper as being abandoned by God himself, a moment of absolute despair.
The play invites us to meditate on the meaning of compassion, commitment, as well as loneliness and horrible hopelessness. There are moments in our lives when God calls us to comfort others, to care for people's wounds, to "kiss the leper". There is also a fragment in François Mauriac's A Kiss for the Leper in which Noémi approaches her husband at night - the husband who is viscerally disgusting to her - while he is pretending to sleep: "she would get up and cover his body in kisses - kisses like those given to the lepers by holy lips, back in the day. Who knows, perhaps these lepers were happy to feel the breath of joyful people!" Was this gesture perceived as offensive? As a form of hypocrisy? The minds and the lives of people are endlessly complicated.
Emanuel Petran first appeared in a play by Vlad Zografi immediately after graduating from the Faculty of Theatre in Cluj, in September 1997. The show was entitled Petru sau Petele din soare / Peter or Splashes of Sunlight, directed by Cristian Ioan, at the North Theatre in Satu Mare. It was well-received by the public and by critics alike and it was performed for a long time.
By Eugenia Sarvari
With Emanuel Petran about the show
Emanuel Petran first appeared in a play by Vlad Zografi immediately after graduating from the Faculty of Theatre in Cluj, in September 1997. The show was entitled Petru sau Petele din soare / Peter or Splashes of Sunlight, directed by Cristian Ioan, at the North Theatre in Satu Mare. It was well-received by the public and by critics alike and it was performed for a long time.
In 2001, the actor appeared in the one-man show Kiss me by Vlad Zografi, under the guidance of Ovidiu Caița. In 2011, he acted in the same show, directed by Victor Olăhuț, in Studio Euphorion. Now, he is performing the same text for the third time. During a break in rehearsals, we discussed his new vision for Zografi's text.
Eugenia Sarvari: How did you come to perform a third variant of the same text and what is the difference between the three versions: from 2001, 2011 and the current one?
Emanuel Petran: I did the first two versions with two different directors. This time, I am working alone, after meeting the author Vlad Zografi in Bucharest. He told me - very elegantly and nicely and trying not to offend me - that the text is not about a homeless person but rather about an individual who enters a room and strives to become the master of that home.
E.S.: Where did you meet? Was it at the Museum of Romanian Literature?
E.P.: Yes, I think so. I explained that this had been the directors' approach. Well, now I am designing my own performance, so I am trying to respect the author's intentions. Because this is the character's trajectory. And I am trying to take it further. Vlad Zografi's premise is that a man enters somebody's home and becomes its master. From a moral point of view, it is wrong; however, it does happen nowadays. Because today they don't only enter our homes, but our souls, too. They try to change our way of thinking by force, to erase our memories, so that we become easy to manipulate. Easy to control, so that we adopt a certain way of acting and thinking.
E.S.: So, the character's illness is more complex...
E.P.: Indeed. Leprosy and the fact that you are suffering from it should not give you any authority over the lives of other people, over their homes. The protagonist has always been ill. He has been cared for and coddled by everybody. Including his wife. This makes him express not love, but frustration. No love for those people who loved him. He chooses not to be loved; he rejects their love. In fact, he rejects everything in the name of freedom, in the name of being able to do whatever he wants because he controls the others one way or another. Here, leprosy becomes the source of control. But in Zografi's play leprosy is a mere metaphor for a person's reckless power over the others.
E.S.: Does your decision to revisit this text also stem from your desire to overcome this time of estrangement, which we are going through and which makes us fear each other and our relationships?
E.P.: Yes, you could say so. But the main idea is to address this issue: the phenomenon of certain people controlling other people's lives.
By Eugenia Sarvari
September 2022
