Bucharest Inside the Beltway, a theater platform linking the US independent stage to the Romanian one was launched on Friday evening at Carol 53 cultural club in Bucharest. There has been an hour and a half ‘first night’ reading from two contemporary theater plays signed by two female writers. Romanian-born American playwright Cristina Bejan and Romanian writer Rucsandra Pop are actually the platform’s initiators.
Bucharest Inside the Beltway is DC’s new culture and arts collective. Bejan and Pop were inspired by the cultural world of Bucharest where professional and amateur artists work collaboratively to create meaningful cultural experiences for the local and international communities. Through Bucharest Inside the Beltway, the two writers hope to bring that spirit of diversity and collaboration in service of culture and art to the District. The collective aims to celebrate performance, writing, translation, visual art, music, film, education and expression in all languages.
Cristina Bejan’s work, DISTRICTLAND, to be presented at the Fringe Festival, is a satire of life in Washington DC, describing the fragmented, dispassionate DC that we’re all familiar with, and asks for something better, more deserving of the human beings who live and work here.
“La nimfomane” signed by Rucsandra Pop tells the story of a young woman who is subjected to a ritual of heart restoration. Her heart is to be recomposed of small puzzled pieces that the woman lost while she was in love with various men.
When studying at the University of Bucharest on a Fulbright, Cristina Bejan met Rucsandra Pop, who was organizing a literary festival in a hip new cafe in Bucharest’s historic Geology Museum. Pop invited Bejan to contribute a live-reading of her play “Colombo Calling – a play from Sri Lanka” which featured actors from across Bucharest’s eclectic and diverse theatre world, including the world famous Maia Morgenstern. Then Pop won a Fulbright to study at the University of Indiana. These two playwrights and poets have been scheming about just such an international and local culture and arts collective since their initial collaboration in 2008. Think the Fulbright Association meets the pre-2012 incarnation of the Romanian Culture Institute and you have Bucharest Inside the Beltway.