A Romanian Cristopher Columbus

Playwright Iosif Naghiu has a great love: the cinema. As a kid, he sneaked in the theatre hall to see a movie and he saw it three or four times in a row. He was in love with everything visual, everything that had to do with script, theatre, playwright and scene. As a child, he was a close friend of the future director Andrei Blaier and poets Romulus Vulpescu and George Astalos. They were playing together in the mud among water buffaloes and leeches and when they were hungry they stole cabbages from the gardens on the lakeshore. His youth was difficult and agitated. He played professional basketball for the Major League with teams like Flamura Rosie or Steaua. He then became a volley coach and graduated from a graphic design institute, a field that he worked in for ten years. He debuted in the “Luceafarul” Magazine the same time as poets Nora Iuga, Constantin Abaluta, Adrian Paunescu, Gabriela Melinescu and Constanta Buzea. In 1962, he had a poetry volume prepared but he never published it because he hated it. He publishes his first volume,” Teama de pasari” (Fear of Birds) in 1968 and starts writing theatre. He crossed over to playwright because his colleagues said that his verses were just like theatre, only without the names for characters. His great success came later when he published his first theatre volume called “Autostop” (Hitchhiking) and the play “Gluga pe ochi” (With a hood over the eyes) was put on stage at the Bulandra Theatre, directed by Valeriu Moisescu and starring the great actor Toma Caragiu. The play ran 60 times and enjoyed an enormous success until the communists banned it in 1971. Then a dark period began for Iosif Naghiu. From 1971 and until 1990, only three plays ever got to the stage. He took refuge in writing and hoped that things will change. One of the plays that are dear to him is “A treia caravela” (The third ship) that was played at the Odeon Theatre two years ago, a play about the conquest of America. However the main character is not Cristopher Columbus but Martin Alonso Pinzon, one of the captains of the other ships, who revolts and leaves the fleet in search of the “Golden Country.” Iosif Naghiu pushed history: in his play, the discoverer of America is Alonso Pinzon, not Cristopher Columbus. There were a few interesting coincidences: Columbus had to wait ten years until he could leave for the New World. Iosif Naghiu also waited ten years until his play, “A treia caravela” was finally staged. He received two prizes of the Writers Union (in 1983 and in 1993) and two prizes from the Bucharest Writers Union, also ten years apart (1974 and 1984). Today, playwright Iosif Naghiu is the secretary of the Bucharest Writers Union, has over 20 written plays and is disappointed with modern Romanian playwrights. He still writes theatre, hoping that one day everything will change.