A season of Cultural Revolution at Fordham University

The theater program at Fordham University, New York, strategically includes the invitation of already recognized artists, with no connection to the school, to work with the students, as a supplementary training coming from a different perspective than the one of the actual professors. The aim is to “expose” the students to more than one vision on theater and enable them to form their own vision through the confrontation with the practical dimension of their training.

The first show of what Matthew Maguire, the head of the Theater Department at Fordham University, called „ A Season of Cultural Revolution” was based on a play by Romanian born playwright Saviana Stanescu, For a Barbarian Woman, directed by Nigel Smith, a star-on the going after the success of Fela! on Broadway (a musical he co-directed it together with Bill T. Jones). The play was selected because „it gives voice to the protest through humor, beauty and Eros”, as Maguire writes in the booklet for the show where he also justifies choosing such a title for the season.

The truth is that 2011-2012 season started in New York almost in the same time with Occupy Wall Street movement, which in the meantime spread around the country in many American cities, expressing the feelings of the jobless and of those who live in debts (the students are highly affected by it, as they have to borrow money from the banks in order to pay for their studies, so they become prisoners of the financial system for a good part of their life).

In these times which are obviously a-changin’, For a Barbarian Woman comes to illustrate the tensioned relationships between the Empire and the marginal cultures where the Empire’s messengers arrive for different reasons. It succeeds in doing so through the entangled stories of Ovid, the Roman poet exiled in Tomis in 8 B.C, who falls for Tristia, a Getae woman, and of Theo, a student from Constanta (contemporary Tomis, a city on the Black Sea shore) who falls in love with an American colonel from the NATO base in the city.

Paradoxically, the most creative part of the play – and for that matter of the show – is not the story (stories) per se, but the postmodern characters that keep involving in it: the Black Sea and the three muses, Ponta, Euxina and Verba, who expand their mission from inspiring Ovid to write his poems to influencing Theo’s life choices. At the end of the day, isn’t life a work of art, too?

In Niegel Smith’s show, Black Sea is an African-American dancer with an androgen look, always on stage, from the opening solo, to the climax scenes – like the one in which Theo is trying to commit suicide – and right to the end. The Black Sea meditates and in its monologues it puts things into historical perspective, creating the necessary distance in order to give relevance to the stories happened in two different epochs. And it is also the Black Sea who mediates the relationships between the common people and the muses, as representatives of another dimension. The three muses are the comical counterpoint to the characters’ drama; their aerial, musical interventions are salted with inter-textual games and have the power to stretch out the tensions gathered in the scenes involving the actual people. This drives us to the conclusion that we, people, take us too seriously sometimes. If the Black Sea dances dressed in a black shining night gown, with a majestic allure and using very self-conscious poses – a kind of Martha Graham – the muses seem to be jumping out from the 50’s, not only with their costumes, make-up and hairdos, but also thanks to the objects they use and the music they bring along when they come to the stage. Their dialogues somehow represent the author’s intellectual voice which touches upon collateral issues, from feminism to creativity and literary gift, building on puns. Not easy to carry on, these characters are tough tests for the students who play them, so it is worth mentioning that they prove themselves very close to the professional standards.

The performance takes an eclectic form, incorporating different aesthetics – realist scenes – like those taking place between Theo and Rich, the American colonel – contemporary dance (the Black Sea), cabaret allusions (the muses) and a draft of parody in the dialogues of Ovid and Tristia. These moments are saturated with evident proves of reciprocal cultural ignorance and become symbolical for the relationship of the colonizers with those colonized, no matter where in the world are they located and in what historical times. These dialogues can really make a study case for post-colonial studies.

It is not by chance that in his commentary in the show’s booklet, Matthew Maguire asks rhetorically: “How do we, as Americans, feel about empire? How do we feel about the necessary steps we must take to dismantle it? Will we do it right? Or we will implode, like the Roman Empire?”

Without trying to answer these huge questions, Saviana Stanescu’s play, in Niegel Smith’s sensitive, full of humor and colorful staging, has the merit of asking them at the right moment in time.