About the Play:
In White Embers, the East confronts and comforts the West in this play about international adoptions and how can they impact a child’s life in major and painful ways.
Produced By:
About the Author:
Saviana Stanescu (www.saviana.com) is a renowned Romanian-born writer based in New York City. Her plays have been widely presented internationally and in the US. Recent New York productions include Aliens With Extraordinary Skills off-Broadway at Women’s Project (published by Samuel French), Waxing West (2007 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Full-length Script) and YokastaS Redux at La MaMa Theatre, Flag Stories at TBG Theatre (part of Myth America Project, a collage of texts by Arthur Kopit, Theresa Rebeck, Israel Horowitz, Jason Grote, etc), Suspendida and Vicious Dogs on Premises (with Witness Relocation) at the Ontological Theatre, Balkan Blues at the NYC Fringe Festival, the E-Dating Project at Strasberg Institute for Theatre & Film, and the site-specific I want what you have at the World Financial Center. Saviana’s plays have received readings and workshops at Long Wharf Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, The Lark, New York Stage & Film, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Playwrights’ Foundation, Traveling Jewish Theatre, Immigrants Theatre Project, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Origin Theatre Company, etc. She has published books of poetry and drama including Aliens With Extraordinary Skills, Waxing West, Google me! (poetry), Black Milk (four plays) and The Inflatable Apocalypse (Best Romanian Play of the Year UNITER Award in 2000). Other published work includes: monologues and scenes in Smith & Kraus annual anthologies, Aurolac Blues, performed at HERE Arts Center, in the anthology Plays and Playwrights 2006; two monologues in the Playwrights’ Center’s Monologues for Women, Jelly-Love and Peanut-Butter in the “Estrogenius” anthology of new plays by women. Saviana was a 2005-2007 TCG fellow with the Lark Play Development Center, where her plays Waxing West and Lenin’s Shoe had barebones productions. She is currently leading the Eastern European Exchange Program for the Lark. She was a 2007-2008 NYSCA playwright-in-residence with Women’s Project and writer-in-residence for Richard Schechner’s East Coast Artists. She holds an MA in Performance Studies (Fulbright fellow) and an MFA in Dramatic Writing (John Golden Award for excellence in playwriting) from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, where she now teaches in the Drama Department.
Saviana’s Forty Days to Forty Plays Interview:
OOB Festival (OOB): Tell us a little about your playwriting career. When did you start writing plays? What are some of your proudest accomplishments as a playwright?
Saviana Stanescu (SS): I started as a poet, publishing a few books of poetry in Romania in late 90s. But my poems had characters and were sort of monologues so actors and students started to perform them in underground clubs and small theatres. My dramatic poem “The Outcast” got selected to represent Romania at the Festival Du Monde Entier, in Paris, at Théâtre Gérard Philipe in 1998. It was a festival sponsored by the Soccer World Cup and each country participating got a play selected for the festival, to be produced in French. To my surprise, my dramatic poem got selected, I was in Paris for my first time, and I was being called a playwright, so what else to do: I became one!
Other trivia: The Romanian soccer team lost the qualifications so headlines in newspapers would state: The Romanian boys got eliminated but Saviana Stanescu is still in competition! So yeah, that was my theatre & soccer moment of fame, which shouldn’t be such a surprise as my dad was a couch and I spent my childhood in stadiums.
My proudest accomplishments are award-related (yes, I’m childish about this, I like awards): when my play Waxing West won the 2007 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Full-Length Play for the La MaMa Theatre production and back in Romania, when I won the Best Play of The Year Uniter Award in 2000 for The Inflatable Apocalypse submitted under a male pseudonym…
And of course, my play Aliens With Extraordinary Skills produced at Women’s Project last season got published by Samuel French! The moment Roxane Heinze-Bradshaw told me she would like to license and publish Aliens was one of the best of my career as I always respected Samuel French Press, I’d see their/your books in London books stores in early 2000 when I was a writer-in-residence there and imagined the day would come when my name would be there on a Samuel French book. And here I am!
OOB: Talk about your entry to this year’s festival. How did you come to write this play? Was there a particular inspiration behind its creation? What do you hope festival audience will take from your play?
SS: I was interested to show how people’s lives are shaped by the social, political and geographical circumstances of their birth and by the “small” choices of more powerful people/countries. I wanted to explore and dramatize the relationship between the West and the East, and the power dynamics/relationships between countries and people. Lots of “big” stuff presented in a “small” personal and hopefully touching story. What is the root of violence? Almost always – the lack of love.
OOB: What is the history of your festival entry? Do you plan to hone and further develop the play in upcoming rehearsals? Has it already been produced?
SS: I wrote the first-draft of this play while a student in the MFA Program in Dramatic Writing at NYU, in Doug Wright’s master class, in 2004. Subsequently it had two workshop productions at Actors Studio and Stella Adler Studio and a full production at Dramalabbet in Stockholm (in Swedish) that got rave reviews and made it in top three of Best Plays of the season in the Swedish equivalent of NYTimes.
OOB: Tell us a little about your producer? How did you come to form your relationship together? If you are self-producing, please talk a little about that process—have you ever mounted your own work before?
SS: Chris Mirto is a wonderful director whom I admire a lot. He’s imaginative and solid at the same time, perfect for my plays as they explore real issues in a somewhat theatrical/stylized manner that Chris totally gets. He directed and co-produced the workshop production of White Embers at Stella Adler Studio, so I thought he’d be the best person to work together with in exploring this play further for the US premiere and larger American audiences.
OOB: Looking back over your personal history in the theatre, what emerges as your favorite memory? Is there a particular story you’d like to share?
SS: Maybe the moment when I saw Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest at the National Theatre in Bucharest in early 90s and I told to myself: I could write something like that!
