On stage in Craiova

I spent four days in Craiova, a regional city in Romania, in June 1990. At the time, I was travelling with a group of 12 as part of a YWAM Christian missionary program. We arrived in Craiova on Friday, June 22, after a successful week of engagements in Pitesti.

Our time here was mildly controversial. I don’t recall all the details, but we were hosted by a local church that proved relatively conservative. Its congregation openly questioned our Pentecostal style of community outreach. No doubt some of them considered us blasphemous.

Our local sponsors were Lydia and George, a husband and wife who’d seen us perform on the streets elsewhere. She was a trained opera singer, and he was a former musician. They had one young daughter called Dimetrias. We later learned that Craiova was considered the cradle of classic operetta music in Romania. Its local operetta company was considered one of the nation’s best for much of the 20th Century.

Lydia and George hosted three of us in their home. You can see all of us in the image that opens this post: me, Dave Craddock, a Canadian (on the left) and Dean Keiller, a Victorian sheep farmer (on the right).  I recall Lydia asking us if there was anything we didn't enjoy eating. Our response was simply "ficat", which translates to liver. At the time, Romania was experiencing widespread shortages of everyday necessities, including basic foodstuffs like meat and bread. As a result, we were often fed dishes that featured liver as the primary protein, or offal, particularly intestines.

Much to our horror, Lydia disappeared into the backyard and returned a short time later with a freshly killed chicken from the family’s coop. She then expertly dipped it into boiling water, plucked it and butchered it. We ate like kings for the next few nights. I felt terrible that the family had sacrificed one of its prize-winning, egg-laying birds for us fussy foreigners - at least that's how I imagined it.  Lydia also made pasta from scratch, something I'd never seen before. Until then, pasta was always something sold ready-made in a bag at the supermarket.

Lydia arranged for us to perform in the local opera house, a neo-Gothic stone building featuring an ornate internal central rotunda framed by imposing Corinthian pillars.  The images above, sourced from the web, provide a good sense of this impressive building (thanks, Google Street View). Tim, our group leader, hated the experience. He complained that “this isn’t who we are”. We weren’t a professional theatre group, and thus, he felt that we didn’t fit into this kind of venue. Personally, I was comfortable being on stage, having performed in musicals and stage plays throughout high school.

To drum up interest in our performance, our hosts arranged for us to stroll through the local park, up and down forested hillside paths, playing a guitar and singing Christian songs. As we walked, our hosts handed out flyers inviting everyone to our evening show. At times, the whole experience felt like something out of The Sound of Music. Once dinner was done, we made our way to the opera house. I gave the group some last-minute tips on how to perform on an indoor stage before its massive red velvet curtain parted.

The performance wasn’t exactly Tony Award-winning material. Our group didn’t really understand how to make full use of the stage despite my last-minute coaching. As a result, everyone gravitated towards the back of the stage (a definite no-no in the world of live theatre) and huddled in a tight circle that failed to utilise the available space. To this day, I’m frustrated by the fact that Tim wouldn’t let me spend time with everyone adapting our production for a theatrical setting.

Our next stop in Romania proved more successful. On Tuesday, 26 June, we drove 110 km west towards the Danube, stopping for nine days in the riverside city of Drobeta-Turnu Severin. Follow this link to learn more.