By Lucia Demetrius, Directed by Dinu Cernescu

„Seeking ideas for the performance together with Dorina Lazăr, we came up to the sentimental history of Three Generations – a troubled history mixed with unfulfilled love stories, with passions and unworthy constrictions.
We wanted to create a vintage parfumed performance, nice costums, set and ambiental music from the beginning of the century. By having precise roles and good actors, I built a theatrical performance with an opening, a story and an ending.”

„The opening night of Three Generations is not a crotchet or a caprice, but the beginning of a programme, an aesthetical and professional step which is meant to make available for the youngsters – actors, directors, spectators – an endorsed view of the Romanians on Romanians, a view on what it meant for the author to have the subtlety to envision the truth between the lines, the art of cheeting the censorship, so that we can understand why were the theatres brimed, although those inside were sitting with gloves and with a rug on their knees”.

Lucia Demetrius Lucia Demetrius (February the 16th 1910, Bucharest – July the 29th, Bucharest) was a writer, poet, interpreter, actress and playwright.
Three generations had its opening night in 1956 at Municipal Theatre (which is now the Lucia Sturza Bulandra Theatre). The cast was made out of great actors: Ștefan Ciubotărașu (Ioniță), Marietta Rareș (Sultana), Fory Eterle (Chiril), Tantzi Cocea (Ruxandra), Jules Cazaban (Alexandru Irimescu), Leny Caler (Miss Macri the young one), Benedict Dabija (Ilie), Beate Fredanov (Eliza).

Throughout time, it was staged in theatres in Bucharest, and also in other parts and abroad (at Riga, at Teatro Nuovo in Torino and in Lithuania), it was translated in five languages (Russian, German, Hungarian, French and Arabic), it was screened in three versions, directed by Nicolae Motric and Ioana Prodan (1971), Nae Comarnescu (1981) and Olimpia Arghir (1985), and in 1989 the composer Sergiu Sarchizov made the three acts opera with the same title.

Photos by Octavian Tibăr

Photos by Mihaela Tulea

A play impeccably performed and academically set up by Dinu Cernescu, a director that comes from an inter-war family of intellectuals that also suffered from the distortions of communism, elegantly put. You can recognize in his production not only the greatness of the longeval director, productive, but also the bourgeois refinement in the best sense of the artistic expression. (…) The actors of the Odeon Theatre serve with pleasure a text that highlights their abilities and the interpretative subtilties. One more eloquent than the other. 

Dinu Grigorescu, May, 10th, 2015

`Three generations` is a pleasant play, that will satisfy a certain type of public that looks for clear theatre, with a clear subject, that does not shock him, impeccable performed by good actors, costumed properly, that rest naturally in their seats and don’t run around the stage. Interesting in this production is that the master Dinu Cernescu did not treat the subjecxt in an archeological manner, but treat it seriously, with no caricature or irony.

Liviu Ornea, Observator cultural, May, 21^st, 2015

Dinu Cernescu put together a jewel-production, a return to the three of the most intersting and rich epochs of Romanian history. Starting from the beautiful and precise stage design of Maria Miu, that suggests – though simple, but relevant details – each of these periods, down to the acting of the actors, everything is well placed in space and time (…)
Crina Mureșan represents the surprise of this production. She interprets Ruxandra, and the actress manages, in a very natural manner, to pass from one age to another: the teenage years, maturity and senescence. From the smallest and most insignificant gestures to the body attitude, Crina Mureșan distinguishes herself as one of the forceful, but subtle, actresses of the Romanian Theatre.

Tudor Sicomaș, Teatrul azi, no. 7-9/ 2015