The Plays
A trilogy
A country to walk into — what the plays bring to the work
The plays are three — a trilogy: Beyond, Through the Clear Clouds, The Bird-Flower and the Well with a Sweep, and The Rain with the Ash of Enchantment. They share one world: children risen from the earth who speak in folk-tautologies, a girl of mist and tears who is always glimpsed and never reached, an offstage voice that answers in incantation, and a fixed weather of stones, leaves that fall in spring, a raft on a stream that runs backward, a well with a sweep. They stand in an old line of theatre — Maeterlinck, Beckett, Ionesco, and behind them the folk-mythic Romanian stage of Blaga and Sorescu — and they are meant to be played as written. What follows is not a reading of them but a placing: what they add to the rest of the work.
What they add, first, is a world. The conceptual cycles, the photographs, the medical archive, even the buried poems are made of ideas, objects, documents, a body, a single voice; none of them is a place you could enter. The plays give the work an inhabited country — a Transylvanian dream-land with its own population and its own physics: green snow, two moons, leaves out of season, a stream that runs the wrong way, a well that is also a balance. Nowhere else in the work is there a landscape you could walk into. With the plays the universe acquires a mythos — a folk-cosmology running underneath the conceptual surface.
They add a new mode. The poems are a single voice in the act of dissolving; the art is object and image, silent and still. The plays are polyphonic and enacted — many voices answering one another, bodies moving in time, action that begins and ends. They bring the work its first sustained art of the many and of duration: not a thing you look at but a world that happens. And the lyric force that drives the poems returns here transplanted — the bracketed « » voice is that poetic register set inside theatre as an oracle — so the plays are also the place where two of Fodoreanu’s modes meet in a single form.
At their center they put children and a serene, ritual death, and that quietly joins two halves of the man the rest of the work keeps apart. His days are spent as a pediatrician, among children and their mortality; the conceptual work rarely touches that directly. Here it becomes myth — children who reason and play and grieve and fold back into the earth without protest, death as sleep rather than rupture. It gives the universe an accepting, folk face of mortality to set beside the clinical confrontation of The Avowed — the same subject met from two sides.
And the two sides share a root. The plays reach past the clinic to the two inheritances the whole practice grows from — the painted icon and the opened body. One of them talks a man apart into trunk and branches and leaves, fingers and “the drained bone of a man,” and the image is older than it looks: Vesalius’s flayed anatomical figures already stand upright and alive in open country, their stripped muscles hanging in sheets, the body half a tree before the play arrives. The atlas dissects a body and stands it in a meadow; the play stands a man in a meadow and dissects him into a tree. And the wood runs both ways — the wonder-working Madonna of his birthplace is paint on wood, a wooden image recorded to have wept for twenty-six days, wood becoming a weeping body, while the tree-man is the exact reverse, a body becoming drained wood. Descended from the villagers who “wrote” those wooden icons and then trained to open bodies, Fodoreanu stands on that crossing, and the plays are where he works it.
These are two ways of opening a body — the icon’s surface that leaks grace, the cut that opens flesh to be read — and the tree-man speech folds them into one, an anatomy performed in words. And what leaks is the same in both. The icon weeps; the tree-man is drained; and in the same play the girl’s tear, falling on a flower, is what kills it: grace leaking out and life emptying out, one gesture, the tear mercy and death at once. It may be the most Nicula thing in the whole body of work — that the weeping which saved a village and the weeping which withers a flower are the same weeping. And beneath all of it stands one figure: the mother’s marked child of the icon, the body laid open as memento mori in the atlas, the children of the plays folding back into the earth without protest. Icon, anatomy, theatre — three inheritances, each circling a dying child, and the pediatrician standing in all three rooms at once.
All of it is the man’s, not the medium’s. The unrepeatable moment — it’s not must-must, it’s just must, once — the beloved who can be seen but never reached, the self that migrates and doubles: all of it recurs here, embodied rather than argued. The doubling earns its keep above all: one actor playing two children who become a figure and a phantom is the plural self given an actual body on a stage, where the poems could only assert it. None of this is new doctrine, and it does not need to be. The plays do not extend the program; they deepen the sensibility, and they supply the register the work was missing — flesh, voice, and a country to set them in. A third mask, Andrei, now stands beside CÎNDE the poet and Cornel the physician, and the constellation of selves is wider for it.