ARTicles vol. 7 i.2a: An Empire of the Imagination

I started work on The Communist Dracula Pageant in 1996. I had known nothing about the Ceausescu dictatorship, but once I started digging, I became fascinated by the escalating madness of the whole thing, particularly the degree to which the Ceausescus succumbed to their own self-defining fantasies.

It’s not just that the Ceausescus were out of touch with reality. It’s that they had recreated it for themselves, vividly, and dragged an entire people with them. It was an empire of the imagination.

And then the revolution itself was such a compelling mixture of fact and fiction, rumor and television. On the one hand it was a genuine expression of frustration and horror, in which thousands of Romanians lost their lives, and on the other hand…what? It was referred to, afterward, as the “Stolen Revolution”; many Romanians even now believe it was a coup, cynically engineered to look like a revolution.

Early in my research I discovered that in 1976 pageants were staged across Romania to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Vlad Tepes, the historical Dracula. Vlad Tepes was a complex figure who played a real and important role in Romanian history, but of course the pageants were really in celebration of Ceausescu, and I found the idea of them irresistible. I wanted the play to encompass both realities, and shades in between. In writing The Communist Dracula PageantI wanted to capture something of the spirit of the Romanian Revolution itself: that whirlwind of chaos and action, rumor, deception, and honesty.7_1