What Do We Really Want? Creating a Union for Actors in Romania

HowlRound: During the last few years, I have taken part in at least three aborted attempts to establish a Romanian equivalent of Actors’ Equity.

Each meeting followed more or less the same pattern: a group of actors, fed up of being abused by one of the two theatrical systems or by the two combined, organized a preliminary discussion with the purpose to create a working group that would eventually propose the rules and structure of an Equity-type theatre artists’ union. The two or three following meetings would be increasingly difficult to be kept within the limits of the agreed topics, fights would erupt, and a stalemate would eventually be the only outcome. Why is this happening, again and again?