Afterword

Felix Anton Rizea was born in Brăila on 30 March 1950. An actor, writer, playwright, and journalist of note in the first years following the fall of communism in Romania, Felix Anton Rizea was a powerful personality — volcanic, charismatic, and unpredictable.

By his very makeup, he was a spirit of joy and of light. He loved the theater constantly, regarding it as his second nature. But he loved, just as much, the spectacle of the world. He looked at people without prejudice of any kind, and at all of them alike; he managed, fairly quickly and sincerely, to forgive his most ferocious enemies; and no human drama, still less a personal one, could for long annihilate his joy of living, with an exuberant optimism that was, of course, disconcerting to those around him. Reality, for him, however harsh it might be, became something made particular by a vibrant sensibility brought to bear on every moment, every event, so that, often, the established order of conventional things would collapse, drained of strength, making way for a second understanding, far more ample in its depths and its nuances.

His childhood and adolescence were filtered through the books of Panait Istrati, the legends of the Brăila Marsh and of the medieval catacombs hidden beneath the city's patriarchal-flavored streets, the whirlpools of the Danube — which every true Brăila native had to swim across — and the mirage of distant worlds carried in the bellies of the ocean liners that anchored now and then in the harbor roadstead.

Irresistibly drawn to acting, he joined the "Victor Ion Popa" Theater in Bârlad, where he made his debut in the role of Făt-Frumos in Înșir'-te mărgărite by V. Eftimiu — a role about which Ion Fotea, in Cronica of 26 February 1972, noting the inspired choice of performer, wrote: "he has charm, freshness, and intelligence, doubled by a spontaneous naturalness that make his passage across the stage a true presence". He was cast as Bubi in Casa care a fugit pe ușă by Petru Vintilă, and in the double role of Castor and Polux in Fata Morgana by Dumitru Solomon — roles favorably received by the critics. About the double role in Fata Morgana, in the newspaper Înainte of 17 March 1973, Constantin Mesta granted him "a special mention," observing: "The actor sketches, precisely, almost mathematically, two characters so different from each other that the spectator's sense of being before two distinct actors is not dispelled until the very end of the performance, when Felix Anton Rizea appears for the curtain call carrying the props of both characters."

His destiny as an actor, however, was a tragic one. After his experience at the Bârlad Theater, his obsession with the stage pushed him into a reckless venture. In 1973, "as if in jest, or on a bet, he gave form to the idea that one gets into the theater institute, among other things, more on talent than on schooling," and, using his sister's high-school diploma, he passed the entrance examination to the "I. L. Caragiale" Institute of Theater and Film Art in Bucharest, in the class of Professor Moni Ghelerter, with Zoe Anghel Stanca as assistant. At the Institute, he performed several student roles: Rică Venturiano in O noapte furtunoasă and Pristanda in O scrisoare pierdută by I. L. Caragiale, Orestes in Medea by Seneca, Doctor Lvov in Ivanov by Chekhov, Horatio in Hamlet, Petru in Acești îngeri triști by D. R. Popescu, the Mime in Lumea în format mic by Marin Sorescu. Toward the end of his second year of study, he was found out, and following an extraordinary trial — in which Maestro Moni Ghelerter, Mrs. Zoe Anghel Stanca, and the great actors Marcel Anghelescu and Constantin Dinulescu pleaded in court on his behalf — he was sentenced to 2 years in prison and to paying damages of 50,000 lei, the sum that a financial assessment had found his schooling costs to be, considered injury to public property. In December 1975, after nearly nine months under arrest, following a petition requesting the suspension of his sentence — which, in an exemplary show of solidarity, leading figures of the Romanian theater agreed to put their names to — he was pardoned by Nicolae Ceaușescu, with the recommendation that he be reclaimed for the theater.

In May 1976, he joined the "Valea Jiului" State Theater, intending to finish high school in evening classes and return to the theater institute; but he was never readmitted to the Institute, and in December 1984, without any explanation, his position at the Petroșani Theater was "restructured," cutting off his access to the stage. His absurd struggle to obtain a diploma in the art of acting did not end until 1992, the year he graduated from the "I. L. Caragiale" National University of Theater and Film Art in Bucharest, in the class of Professor Florin Zamfirescu. The one who put an end to this Sisyphean odyssey was the great actor Victor Rebengiuc, who approved his re-enrollment at U.N.A.T.C.

At Petroșani, between 1976 and 1984, he played, across 8 seasons, 27 roles, varied in style, structure, and scale. Although they were not quite the roles he would have wished for, his presence on the stage was consistently recorded by the theater reviews. About one of these, Petre Vereș in Nu suntem îngeri by Paul Ioachim, Ion Fiastru, in Scânteia tineretului of 26 December 1976, wrote: "In the role of Petre, Felix Anton Rizea comes onstage with the explosive tumult of a young man who refuses the molds imposed on him and fights doggedly against them. The performer shades every line with refinement and discretion, demonstrating intelligence and stage virtuosity."

The sincerity with which he gave himself, the grief or revolt that flooded him whenever someone — or something — set itself crosswise to his organic need to climb onto the stage, and, finally, the banning of his access to it, gradually channeled him from the "boards" toward writing. About this period in Felix Anton Rizea's life, Dumitru Velea writes: "In Felix Anton Rizea's case, intelligence keeps watch over affectivity, the frenzy of inspiration is subjected to rigor, to law; he believes that truth in the theater is convention, and expression construction. His acting is at first cautious, with an undecided movement between being the character himself and the actor who plays him. Later, probably also because the 'promise' of returning to the Institute went unfulfilled, something in this art of representation leaves him dissatisfied too. From his depths, other creative gestures set out. He turns his mind toward directing, and finally toward the art of writing (branching out: into film scripts, dramaturgy, prose). He becomes a continual dissatisfaction and a tense search." By the age of 36 he had already finished the three plays of The Madmen's Trilogy: Emigrants to Mecca, The Box of Monkeys, and The Comedy of the Madmen, the last of which initially circulated through the theaters under the title Chess Is Chess and Demands Respect — "Written clearly, with calculation and tension, open toward parable, with uncomfortable undercurrents." At the same time, he worked on two film scripts, Sebastian's Ship, with autobiographical overtones, and Don't Strike Făt-Frumos, or Caesar and Cleopatra, a delicious satirical allegory in which Făt-Frumos was brought into the present day, and on the novel Domino, or 43 Propositions from Spinoza's Ethics Demonstrated with Scenes from the Life and Love of a Vagabond, published by Editura 24 DE ORE in Iași in 1995, sending them out, as the case required, to theaters, publishers, and film studios, without harboring too many illusions that his writings would be able to get past the fine sieve of communist censorship.

In 1985, he managed to send The Box of Monkeys to the literature competition launched by Radio Free Europe in the autumn of 1984, and the play was awarded a prize by a prestigious jury and discussed on the program "Tinerama" by Max Bănuș and the director Val Mugur. He never collected the prize, the play was never staged as the competition's organizers had promised, but what followed was a long string of periodic interrogations at the Securitate, continuous surveillance "by specific means" — that is, microphones installed around the house, friends summoned to give statements, and the "recommendation" that he show up daily at "Georgică," a bar in the Hermes district of Petroșani, to drink his morning coffee.

Sensing the ordeal that was to come, in June 1985 he tried to cross the Danube at Orșova, swimming underwater with a paint pump filled with compressed air on his back. As ill luck would have it, he sprained his foot before entering the water, became disoriented, and surfaced too soon. He was caught by the border guards, and to escape them he went back, underwater, to the Romanian bank.

To get past his material difficulties, he learned in two days and two nights how to make artistic padded jackets, quickly becoming the most renowned "puffer-jacket man" in Petroșani. With the money he earned, he rigged up a cable television, with the homemade satellite installation to go with it, which he practically abandoned on 22 December 1989.

After he put the speakers out on the balcony so that the demonstration in Bucharest could be heard in the street, together with Dan Tăbăcaru and a few brave neighbors, they set off the revolution in Petroșani. "In December 1989, he is among the first on the balcony of the Petroșani Town Hall. He speaks of freedom and democracy; with the television set brought from home, so that the crowd in the street could watch 'the revolution live.' He did not carry on beyond that, he found no place for himself among the profiteers, and after a few days he left for Bucharest, to struggle among others greater than he. His pro-Western ideas were pure; he believed in them."

In Bucharest, he began his work as a journalist on the editorial staff of the weekly Zig-Zag, which he left together with the entire staff in the wake of the scandal that erupted between Ion Cristoiu and the publication's owner. He did not follow Ion Cristoiu to Evenimentul Zilei, as the rest of his colleagues did, but joined the weekly Cațavencu; and when Ovidiu Nacu, the magazine's owner, yielding to certain "pressures," wanted to turn it into a scandal sheet with an erotic slant, he was one of the "plotters" who, by founding Academia Cațavencu, in fact founded one of the most hard-hitting journalistic spectacles in the post-1989 Romanian press. He served on the magazine's board of directors, taking charge of the investigations department. For four years he remained the principal byline on page 3, the page of exposés, which he had in fact established in the magazine to serve as counterpoint to what he called — referring to the magazine's editorial policy — stroking the cat.

"He writes articles with dramatic verve; his ideas struggle to shed light through alluvia of every color. With his ideals and ideas crushed, he draws in among the few embittered souls of the day."

He gave himself to the magazine body and soul, forgetting home, family, friends. In this time he made himself a host of powerful enemies and, of course, reactivated some of the old ones. When these enemies realized that Felix Anton Rizea's fight was a solitary one, that he refused to fall into line, that he had no "practical" sense of the morrow, that his basic weapon bore a strong resemblance to Don Quixote's lance — even if he had seriously upgraded it with his fundamental precept: "Tangle 'em up, devil take it!" — that he could not be manipulated, that his choices were clear, precise, anti-communist and anti-Securitate, his enemies, classic ones by now, attacked him and annihilated him.

In 1995, he withdrew to Călimănești, built himself a little bar on the bank of the Olt that looked more like a stage, played billiards, and wrote screenplays for television series (The Testament, Roberta's Revenge, and The Immortals, or The Woman of the 21st Century, an adaptation of the play Greetings and Gerovital from Felix). Two of them won a screenplay competition at Romanian Television in 1996, but it was only in 2000, after the second, that the series Roberta was produced, in four episodes, directed by Vali Hotea — the first post-1989 Romanian television series.

About his withdrawal to Călimănești, in a letter from 1996, Felix Anton Rizea said with bitterness: "(…) the one who came to Călimănești was a Felix convalescing after a bad, violent illness, one that might be called the Sickness of the Defeated, defeated by other people's pettiness and cowardly violence — or, better put, it wasn't the Sickness of the Defeated that I suffered from, because I, too, was violent in what I wrote, even if I was in the right. (…) in my innermost self I was saved by the thought that, by rights, no one had defeated me in DIRECT confrontation, but vilely, through truths told only by quarters, from which the squalor was extracted and shown to the world, while the beauty was hidden behind dozens of locks. So, I had come to Călimănești so Battered, so struck by this squalor, that the only thing I needed from the others, who this time were close to me, was just a grain of ATTENTION…"

With the publication of The Madmen's Trilogy, Felix Anton Rizea remains in the arena, and this time he does so purified by fire and ash, like any Phoenix, making the point — from within an organic fusion with human destiny and the beauty of the Planet — that cowardice, irresponsibility, ideology, and the madness of empty vanities perpetuate an apocalypse that has long since become an everyday fact. The three plays of The Madmen's Trilogy have been rolling through time for a quarter of a century now, without their relevance being exhausted; on the contrary, their living, dynamic text molds itself, adapting as if to the different historical sequences of the reality it confronts.

The fourth play written by Felix Anton Rizea — which initially circulated under a pseudonym through the literary offices of the theaters under the title Greetings and Gerovital from Felix, and was later turned into a pilot episode for the television series The Immortals, or The Woman of the 21st Century — finally found its way to the public in October 2008, through the drama department of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company, with an exceptional cast (Tamara Buciuceanu-Botez, Ileana Stana Ionescu, Monica Ghiuță, Virgil Ogășeanu, and Ion Haiduc), directed by Vasile Manta.

Felix Anton Rizea was extinguished in a flash in the spring of 1999, on 30 March, his birthday, as he turned 49. He was defeated by a cancer overwhelming in scale, with cranial metastases, which gave him no conclusive warning before bringing him down irrevocably. It had overwhelmed his chest while leaving his bronchi untouched. Seeing the X-ray, Professor Ioan Paul Stoicescu gave him a guillotine deadline: three weeks. Felix's desire to live here and now extended the term the professor had prescribed by another four weeks, without his going beyond the stage of ordinary painkillers.

On the day before his final departure, although his physical resources were plainly exhausted, with an immense and radiant love in which he melted the miracle of life and perhaps immortality itself, he said: "From tomorrow we change the kalimera."

LER