October 3, 2008: Garage Theatre and Iris

Dear Friend,

There was a breakthrough today, praise God. I ended the day on a really positive note and I hope I can maintain it for the next two months. I’ll explain as I unfold the day’s activities.

I spent the afternoon with Luisa and her friend Ana (I’m meeting a lot of Anas) in another part of the Old City, the part of Bucureşti that retains a lot of the cities old architecture. Bucureşti has patchwork architecture all over the city. New, sleek buildings are likely to be found next to old, decaying buildings from the nineteen-fifties. The old, decaying buildings could also be from as late as the nineteen-eighties, as well, because construction during Communism was a bit of a joke. The Old City, however, holds architecture that has been restored or maintained. There are influences from Ancient Greek to Victorian. I really enjoyed the atmosphere. It was relaxing, separated from the crazy traffic, almost as if we had stepped through a portal that took us from broken up blacktop and noisy traffic to cobblestone streets and the occasional sound of techno rock. This city is an anachronism unto itself. There were still hints of upheaval, though, in the form of construction crews taking out the cobblestone streets to “modernize” things a bit more with newer streets. There were also sections of the street torn up, revealing an excavation project. Apparently there’s an even older city underneath our feet.

Luisa made the comment that I seemed much more laid back. While we were walking around I had been making good conversation with her and with Ana, asking and answering questions about family, school, and the usual. I explained I was beginning to become more comfortable with the city, that it wasn’t as overwhelming as it had been before. At this point, I was remembering the thoughts I’d been having about my behavior since I arrived in Bucureşti. I’m going to have to make it very clear before I leave how thankful I am to everyone for their patience with this little college student from Orange City, Iowa.

We had our first rehearsal tonight. Actually, everyone had their first rehearsal. I watched. The play is in Romanian, so my participation would get rather complicated, considering the performance is within a week. What I saw would probably be considered, production-wise, something short of community theatre. The entire experience – the pre-rehearsal waiting for everyone to show up, the pre-rehearsal debriefing, and the actual rehearsal – felt a lot like what I would imagine being in a garage band would feel like. None of the members have a contractual obligation, necessarily. At least, they don’t have a contractual obligation beyond communal contribution. Everyone shows up because they’re committed to each other, but most importantly to their project. However, this is all volunteer work in an organization where everyone sort of threw themselves together.

So, the garage theatre rehearsal went rather well, at least, from where I was standing. Cristina, Vali’s girlfriend, did her best to translate for actors who were doing more of a speed-through than an actual beat-by-beat rehearsal. As overwhelming as this seemed, compared to city traffic, I preferred this over the traffic. I was experiencing theatre. I can handle being overwhelmed by that. Iris, however, seemed much more frazzled. Not everyone had shown up, so she had to do some quick rehearsal recasting, which involved her taking on a role. As the director, this was somewhat disastrous. People also had to leave early for other appointments. Garage theatre, am I right?

Iris and I kept company for the rest of the night after rehearsal over. On our way home, she asked if I had any suggestions. I had been wracking my brain on ideas during the rehearsal, so I already had plenty of answers for her. I spoke primarily about play and character structure. Iris commented she didn’t know theatre, but she seemed to understand the concepts rather well. I explained that characters need to have goals, the actors’ movements need to have purposes related to those goals and the story of the play, and those purposes need to also influence the lines. Each line needs to be preempted by the previous line which needs to be preempted by the previous line. She understood each of these ideas, but also confessed frustration with having very little time to rehearse people who were not trained actors.

The conversation about the play continued after we returned to the flat. While we were having supper the conversation trailed somehow into a discussion about family. Iris’ mom was asleep and Vali had left rehearsal rather quickly in order to catch a train to some other part of the country he wanted to visit for the weekend. It was just Iris and I.

Iris isn’t Christian. She’s confessed her religious beliefs tend more toward Hindu, as it’s a religion that matches more with her understanding of the world. With her psychology background rolled into that, I’ve come to think she holds somewhat of a secular humanist perspective. Her psychology background has manifested itself quite a bit in our past conversations, which makes me think that’s how she understands the theatre concepts I explained.

Our conversation about family was about things passed down through heritage. I had made a comment about my Dutch stubbornness and Iris asked if I still felt that manifesting itself in me after five generations (I had told her earlier in the week I wasn’t really Dutch, but fifth generation American Dutch, and only half that.) We then started talking about the characteristics that pass down from generation to generation and how they manifest themselves in each generation. In the case of Dutch stubbornness, sometimes characteristics manifest themselves negatively between two generations, at which point there is a divergence. It’s natural for a child to diverge a little from the parents during growth. That’s how independence happens, that’s how the child becomes his or her own person. However, this divergence between two generations that I was referring to is a negative divergence because it’s the manifestation of Dutch stubbornness working against itself between the two generations. An example of this would be a son reacting with his own stubbornness in retaliation to his father’s stubbornness. The son thinks his father is too controlling, packs his bags, and sets out on his own, figuratively or literally. He has his own stubbornness to get through life untouched. He learned that from his father. Therefore, he doesn’t need his father. A healthy divergence would involve more reconciliation between the two generations, in which case a mutual understanding, agreeing to disagree, would take place.

It was a very interesting conversation. Iris spoke a little about how there has been some diverging in her family and amongst her relatives. It’s a natural occurrence, but she agrees that sometimes it happens unhealthily. This led into a conversation about forgiveness, which I knew would probably get a little sticky, given our differing religious beliefs. I was, however, still able to express what I believed and she was able to express what she believed. We agreed on some things. On other things, we didn’t agree so much. However, we each expressed what we felt was necessary to express. We ended up getting to know each other better in a way that we no longer had to worry about offending the other with our opinions.

It was around quarter after ten when we finished our conversation. We decided to head to our separate rooms for bed. Before we left the kitchen, though, Iris thanked me for the good conversation and for opening up. I, in turn, thanked her for her patience with me, as the past couple of days had been rather difficult for me. We got to know even more about each other just in those next five minutes, as we told each other our impressions of the past week and how we each handled the challenges. It was very helpful to have just that moment together, as we cleared the air a lot and broke down a number of barriers. Iris had been afraid that my silence and guardedness towards her had been about her beliefs, so it was good to clear the air.

This was a very good night. I had been asking others to pray for me and had been praying myself for something like this to happen, an ice-breaker that I hope and pray will lead me to more opportunities to invest in the people I’m working with. What a good night. Thank you for your prayers, friend. Keep them coming, because great things are happening.

Blessings.
Kailen