Theater: Rumanian Reunion in Minneapolis

Two directors from Bucharest restage Faulkner and Figaro

Minneapolis could be the Midwest's dream of itself. Swaths of verdant farm land radiate from the Twin Cities to outlying towns, like spokes on the wheels of a bicycle built for two. The sleek skyscrapers along Nicollet Avenue support a canopy of planetarium stars in a smogless evening sky. In Loring Park, through which Mary Tyler Moore used to jog on her way to work at the WJM-TV newsroom, thousands of goldfish huddle invitingly in a sculptured pond. On a recent Saturday night, a wagon train of autos streamed into a huge field for the summer's first football game. And across the street from that field, on the thrust stage of the Guthrie Theater, two adventurous Rumanians were toiling to expand the scope of U.S. regional theater.

This is the second year of Liviu Ciulei's tenure as the Guthrie's artistic director; last season his acclaimed stagings of The Tempest and As You Like It helped win the company record ticket revenue and a return to the national spotlight. In 1963 Sir Tyrone Guthrie opened the theater as a home (indeed, a modernist mansion) for the classical repertory. At just that time Ciulei, who was presiding over the renowned Bulandra Theater in Bucharest, hired a university student named Andrei Serban to direct Julius Caesar. With that production, performed in Kabuki style, Serban established his reputation for radical reinterpretation of the classics, and since then he has staged plays and operas in Europe and the U.S. In 1974 Ciulei followed his student to America, where he proved himself a wizardly surgeon among directors, able to cut to the heart of a play or a character without lacerating the flesh of the text.

Now Ciulei has brought Serban to Minneapolis for a Rumanian reunion. Curiously, both directors selected "sequels" for their summer offerings. William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun, which Ciulei has staged, is a continuation of the story of Temple Drake first told in Sanctuary. Serban's choice, The Marriage of Figaro, is the second play in Beaumarchais's Figaro trilogy, preceded by The Barber of Seville and succeeded by The Guilty Mother. The new productions provide an instructive study in contrasts: between dark and light, stark and starkers, funeral and carnival, Southern Gothic tragedy and Age of Enlightenment farce.

In Requiem for a Nun, the past is everything, a guilty past that seeps through the soul's pores like Delta humidity. When Temple Drake was an Ole Miss coed in the 1920s, she and her beau Gowan Stevens met up with a vicious bootlegger named Popeye who abused Temple beyond pain, perhaps into a kind of rancid ecstasy. Eight years later, when Requiem begins, Temple and Gowan are married and have had two children, one of whom has been killed by Nancy, "a dope-fiend nigger whore" who served as the children's nurse. The play, like Oedipus Rex, is a detective story that tracks truths its characters would not reveal to others or themselves.