Elise Wilk: I believe in live, relevant and powerful theatre that mirrors us. I think the world needs stories
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Adina Chirvasă, Days and Nights, 16 December 2023
Elise Wilk from Brasov is one of the best Romanian playwrights of her generation. Her plays are performed in many different parts of the world, but Brasov is not missing in this “constellation”.
Recently, the city at the foot of Tampa Hill hosted a new premiere of her signature work, Crocodile, presented at the newest cultural space, the Apollonia Cultural Bank, following a preview at the Multicultural Center. “Crocodile” enjoyed the “Brașovian imprint” from one end to the other: the director is Loreni Zabravceanu and the cast includes Mihaela Alexandru and Sabina Brândușe. “Crocodile”, however, is just one of the author’s plays, which have been awarded many times since her first works.
Elise Wilk (b. 29 July 1981, Brasov) was one of the winners of the 2008 dramAcum5 competition with her first play, It Happened on Thursday.
Since then, her texts have been staged in theatres in Romania and abroad and translated into 12 languages.
She won the Irish Embassy Award for the best text staged in the 2012-2013 season (Green Cat), the National Playwriting Competition organised by the National Theatre of Timisoara (2015, Paper Planes), and the Playwriting and Monodrama Competition organised by the George Bacovia Theatre in Bacau (2017, Crocodile).
Some of her texts have been adapted for radio.
In 2017 and 2018, the play Explosive, a National Radio Theatre production, was a big winner in competitions on three continents, winning the 2017 Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union Grand Prix, Marulich Grand Prix in 2018 and the Gold Medal at the 2018 New York Festival. Forbes Romania magazine named her one of the young trendsetters in 2014 and Decât o Revistă one of the 100 Leaders of Tomorrow Romania (2018).
In 2019, she received the “Person of the Year in the German Diaspora” award from the Internationale Medienhilfe.
In 2021, the text Crocodile, translated into Italian by Roberto Merlo, won the Carlo Anoni International Prize in Milan.
In 2022, the play Disappearing, translated by Joanna Kornas-Warvas, won the AURORA Prize for Eastern European Playwriting in Poland. In the same year, Elise Wilk received the Romanian Drama Theatre Award for Contemporary Playwriting.
Elise Wilk graduated from the Faculty of Journalism (Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca). She holds a Master’s degree in Literature and Communication (University of Transylvania Brasov) and a Master’s degree in Dramaturgy (Targu Mures University of the Arts).
She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performing Arts (University of the Arts in Targu Mures, 2020) with a dissertation on theatre for youth audiences in Romania, and from 2021 she will teach dramaturgy at the same university.
She translates contemporary German drama into Romanian and is a member of the German Committee of the Eurodrama.
“I believe in a vibrant, relevant, strong theatre that mirrors us. I believe the world needs stories.”
Why drama and not poetry or a novel? Where does the passion for this form come from and when does it begin?
As a kid, when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered: a writer. At 10, I already had an orange notebook full of poems I had written (and still have). I think these poems already had something theatrical about them, most of them were about animals that I likened to various family members – in fact they were sort of character studies.
I discovered theater in my teenage years, in the troupe of Johannes Honterus High School, led by Mrs. Ada Teutsch. When I joined the troupe, I was mostly in skits, but my older classmates were rehearsing Friedrich Durenmatt’s The Physicists. I read the play and was fascinated. I was so fascinated that I remembered all the parts. On the last page of each notebook I wrote quotes from the play.
That’s when I knew I wanted to write theater later.
I actually didn’t wait long to do it. When I was 15, I wrote my first play in German, obviously emulating authors I admired. A few years later, a teacher staged it with his students in the assembly hall of the high school and invited me to the premiere. It was the most terrifying experience of my life up to that point. I didn’t like anything that I saw. What I least liked was the text. Yet, inexplicably, I kept wanting to write plays. I kept writing things that didn’t amount to anything, because they were abstract and had no connection to real life, until one day I wrote a text that did have a connection to real life, and won a pretty big contest at the time, dramAcum. From then on things developed naturally.
Later I remembered that if you hang in there and don’t give up after a disappointing experience, you can do it. It’s a field where you’re very much at risk, where there will always be people who don’t like what you’re doing and will criticize you, where you sometimes feel discouraged, where there’s a lot of pressure (especially after success when expectations are very high). You need to know how to handle these situations.
Why theatre?
Because right now it’s the best way to express myself. In fact, as others have noted, many of my texts are a kind of hybrid between poetry, prose and drama. I want to write a novel at some point, and I’ve been encouraged to do so from the beginning – I hope to one day find the time and peace of mind to do it.
A playwright’s life is more hectic – of course, there is a time when you write alone at home, but then you are always in contact with the creative team – director, actors, set designer. I go to rehearsals, I travel around the country and abroad for premieres of plays based on my texts, I hold playwriting seminars, master classes, I go to friends’ premieres, I try to get to the plays that interest me because I am also a spectator.
If I want to write fiction, I think I’m going to have to give up that lifestyle for a while.
How has your style evolved over the years? Did you start writing for yourself, for others, what motivates and drives you?
I don’t think I’ve ever written just for myself. Not even the diary. I knew my mother read it.
Even as a child, I used to make up stories and act them out behind my armchair, and I was always happy when I had an audience. In fifth grade, the principal said she would give a book to anyone who knew a poem. I said one of my poems. I wasn’t afraid to read it in front of my classmates, I wanted them to hear it. But in any writing process, you are also writing for yourself-because you are your first reader.
I also give a piece of advice to my students at the University of the Arts in Târgu-Mures, where I teach playwriting: write the story you would like to see in the theatre.
For a few years now I’ve only been writing texts on demand – i.e. a theatre or a director offers me a topic to write about. For me, this is the best way of working because, firstly, I am obliged to write (otherwise I would write much less often) and, secondly, I think it is normal to write about a certain topic (not just “write about whatever you want”) when you have complete freedom within that topic.
I’m motivated by a topic I like (sometimes I’ve accepted to write about things that seemed distant, I’ve seen it as a challenge and a way out of my comfort zone, other times I’ve realized that the story was always inside me and just needed an external push, to come to the surface), it motivates me when the project has gone well, it motivates me when it has failed, it motivates me when I see someone’s good performance, when I get feedback from the audience, when I get messages or emails from people who have been moved by the performance I’ve seen.
What really defines your style? What is your credo?
My style has changed over the years, sometimes when I go to performances of plays I wrote 13-14 years ago I think “I would take that out”, “that’s childish”, “I don’t like that anymore”, there are times when I feel very far removed from them.
That’s a good sign, it means I’ve evolved. And yet I’m glad that these texts can still be seen on stage, that they have stood the test of time, that there is still interest in them from directors – I think every playwright wants that.
As for the style, last year, after the Arad premiere, a director told me that even if he didn’t know who wrote the lyrics, he would have known that I was the author. Another time, I wrote a collaborative text with two other playwrights (each of whom wrote several episodes) and was surprised that some people didn’t guess who wrote which episode. They say that you have to constantly reinvent yourself along the way of a play. That’s probably true, but I think those changes should come naturally, not forced.
I believe in a vibrant, relevant, powerful theatre that holds a mirror up to us to better understand ourselves, and that questions today’s world through the prism of stories. I believe the world needs stories.
What influences your writing, what inspires you?
I think it’s different for different projects. I work best under pressure, when I have deadlines that I have to meet, especially since I have a lot of responsibility.
In order for everything the audience sees on stage to exist, the text must first exist. Writing the text is the first step in the process of creating the performance, and the rest of the performance depends on this first step.
If the text is good, the art team has a solid foundation to build on later.
It inspires me a lot to go to the theatre and I would like to do it more often.
What would you like audiences to remember when they see/read your plays?
I wouldn’t want him to remember anything in particular.
I believe each person in the theatre/reader gets a different message depending on the personal filter the performance/text goes through.
But I would like the audience to leave the theatre a little different than they came. To recognize themselves in some of the characters. To ask questions.
Which of your company items would you choose? Please recommend three of your favourite models and tell us why.
I went to all the performances after my plays because theatre is where you learn best.
They say it’s good to go to rehearsal and hear your lines spoken by the actors to find out what works and what doesn’t. I think those things are really only discovered with the audience in the theatre, because no performance is complete without an audience, and during the performance you see the audience’s reactions live.
I recommend Disappearing, it’s my favorite work so far.
I wrote it in 2019, it won the Aurora Prize in Poland, it’s already been translated into seven languages, published in several anthologies, and so far there have been five different performances of the text (plus one radio performance in Germany). She has quite a resume and I hope there will be more performances in the future.
In Romania it is performed under the direction of Cristian Ban at the Andrei Mureșanu Theatre in Sfantu Gheorghe (in Romanian), and in Hungarian at the Yorik Studio in Targu-Mureș, under the direction of Sebestien Aba. I wrote the text for this performance in Hungarian five years ago. It was intended for a studio theatre with a maximum capacity of 100 people, but last summer it was performed in front of 800 spectators on an open stage in Budapest and received a special award at a festival in Hungary.
That’s why I recommend both exhibitions in Romania with Disappearing. I recommend them because there were many viewers who told me:
“This show is about me. It’s like seeing my life on stage.”
Even if that’s not their story on stage. But they found themselves in it, and I think that’s the play where that’s been said to me the most. I also recommend them because they make you laugh a lot, even if it’s about a touchy subject – the displacement of ethnic Germans from Romania. People probably find themselves in the story, because I don’t think there’s a family in Romania that doesn’t have at least one relative who went abroad.
I would also recommend “Union Place”, one of my recent texts.
The show (with actors from Austria, Romania and Luxembourg and speaking three languages), directed by Alexandru Weinberger-Bara, cannot be seen in Romania as it is a production of Schauschpielhaus Salzburg, but next year it will be available to watch online. And there are a lot of laughs here too, even if it is serious stuff. There are three stories that take place in different parts of Europe – Vienna, Timisoara and Luxembourg – and they are all connected.
I think it’s a must-watch because it’s impossible not to find yourself in at least one of the three episodes and because the cast is extremely good and works extremely well as a team, even if they’re from different theatres.
And for those who don’t know it, I would also recommend Green Cat, because it’s my most famous theatre play.
I wrote it in 2012, it’s been translated into 10 languages and performed in many countries, and a new show comes out every year. Last week it premiered in Bulgaria. I would go to see the show because I would like to know after 12 years if the story is still relevant to young people today.
You are also a journalist. Tell us a bit about that work and how (if at all) you see one kind of writing influencing the other.
My best memories are from the early years of the press, when there was TEXPlus, an appendix of Transivania Expres, which published longer pieces – reports and investigations – under the direction of Alexandru Giza (Alghi).
I fondly remember the collective of that time and the reporting we did back then – for example, 15 years after the Revolution we tracked down all the children born on 22 December 1989 and interviewed those who agreed. I went to the maternity ward, made an inquiry, got a list of the women who had given birth on that day, looked up their names in the phone book, and called. At the right time! It was 2004.
I asked the woman on the phone if she had given birth to a child on the day of the revolution.
I found three or four of these children who had turned 15, went to their homes and talked to them about their plans for the future, whether they wanted to stay in Romania.
I must have worked for three weeks on this story. And now I love slow, well-researched journalism that covers a topic in depth. But there are few places in Romania where you can do that anymore (with the exception of one magazine, Decât o Revistă, which used to publish this kind of stuff but then closed down).
And in the German-language newspaper Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung für Rumänien, where I coordinate the Brasov supplement Karpatenrundschau, we do larger pieces – reports, interviews, portraits. We can write about whatever we want and that is a great privilege. It seems to me that journalism and playwriting have a lot more in common than meets the eye. First of all, it’s important to have a good, up-to-date story that’s relevant to the times we live in.
Both theatre and media are meant to show you what’s going on in the world, but theatre is deeper, it explores deeper. Then, the work of documenting a play often uses journalistic methods (interviews with sources, access to archives). Third, a theatre text, like a newspaper article, has a lot to say in a few words.
You have to keep the readers/listeners engaged because otherwise they will go to another site or change the radio station. The same goes for theatre – if something bores the viewer, you’ve lost them.
Then you have to keep up with what’s going on in the world. Be curious.
As a journalist, you meet all sorts of interesting people along the way who can be an inspiration for your characters. My first plays from 15 years ago were heavily influenced by people I met during my work as a journalist. How do you see the recipe for success in both activities? What would you recommend to young people (but not necessarily) who are looking for a future profession or looking for themselves?
In journalism, this is more difficult.
In my early years in the press I worked in investigations, published several investigations into embarrassing subjects, and was involved in court cases – it sounds quite exciting, but it is ultimately frustrating. I realised I couldn’t change anything, that the corrupt politicians I was writing about were still there.
It was quite painful. It’s a windmill fight, and the rewards are small. I think it’s hard to find young people passionate about print media now.
I remember excitedly running out to the newsstand to buy the paper in which my story appeared. I think that joy is gone, now anyone can publish anything.
In theatre, things are not easy either, but the rewards are greater. I would advise young people who don’t know what career path to choose to look into it as much as possible.
I was lucky because I always knew what I wanted. In high school, I realized that not everyone knows that. They didn’t even need to know. But you have to look, try, be curious. Now there are all kinds of seminars I can take, I think it’s almost impossible not to find something that suits you.
In relation to the definition of success, I think it means doing what you love and making enough money to afford the life you want. But it takes work and patience to achieve that. Things don’t happen overnight.
What are your plans for the future?
The last text I wrote was for a co-production between the German State Theatre in Timisoara and the Altenburg-Gerra Theatre in Germany – the German author Anja Hilling and I wrote a play about poverty.
The topic is difficult and quite distant for me, but I tried to address it as best as possible and I started from several real cases from Romania in recent years. At the moment, I propose to make a few changes to the text. The premiere will be in May 2024.
And soon I’ll start writing a new play, which will be called Alaska, and will premiere at Yorick Studio in Târgu-Mureș, also in the first half of 2024. In the future, I want to publish a new volume of plays that will include plays staged between 2019 and 2023. And one day to write that novel.
And one more thing that is not related to the theatre – a tourist guide for the country of the Secui (the region in Central Romania inhabited by ethnic Hungarians – ed.) for German tourists, but it will not be so much about the places, but about the people who have unique tourist projects in the area and with whom we conducted interviews.
I’m passionate about travel (if I wasn’t a writer I’d definitely be a blogger), I think Romania has a lot of hidden treasures and I love discovering them.
This interview was originally published by the Romanian cultural site Days and Nights and is republished wiht the consent of the author.
Photo: Elise Wilk (source: A. Bordeianu)
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