University of San Francisco Magazine
Fall, 2004
Escape From Transylvania
By Mira Schwirtz
Silvian Centiu ’93, a former revolutionary in his native Romania, may have failed in his one-time plan to assassinate former communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, but he succeeded at turning 23 years of living under one of the 20th century’s most ruthless tyrants into a stop-’em-dead, one-man stage performance.
As a child, Centiu was forced to work in the fields at the cost of his education after Ceausescu nearly starved the country to death under a haphazard plan to mechanize farm work, Centiu grew up seeing shops open for business but empty of many supplies. For questioning the communist regime, he was labeled a “troublemaker”. After his group’s assassination plot was uncovered, Centiu managed to make a harrowing escape into Serbia and then trek hundreds of miles into Austria. Ceausescu was eventually assassinated in 1989 and the country is now democratic.
Despite his dramatic experiences, Centiu said recreating for American audiences what it was like to live behind one of the darkest parts of the Iron Curtain required some artistic inspiration.
“When I came to the United States in 1991 and told people anything about Romania – for example, that certain shoe sizes were not available because the factory assigned to make them wasn’t producing them – people didn’t believe it”, said Centiu, who earned a bachelor’s in information systems management at USF’s College of Professional Studies and is now a software director at Oracle Corp. “They couldn’t relate to the deprivation and absurdity in Romania”.
It was a management class offered by Oracle that helped Centiu turn his experiences into a comedic monologue. His corporate audiences liked his Romanian jokes – “Jokes in Romania were a survival mechanism”, he said – and pretty soon he had a reputation as a good storyteller.
One story he includes in his 70-minute performance describes how butcher shops never stocked any meat. “Before communist, the sign on the meat store said ‘At Joe’s”. You went in, and found meat”, Centiu says. “In communism, where all private enterprise was banned, the sign on the store said ‘Meat’. You went in, and found only Joe”.
Centiu finally wrote up the first half of a monologue early this year and searched out theater venues before landing space at the Actor’s Theater in San Francisco. He sat down to write the second half four hours before he had to mail it to New York to be considered for the city’s annual Fringe Festival, the play was accepted and, after a successful five-week run in San Francisco, enjoyed seven performances in New York.
Centiu said he would like to keep producing and acting in plays based on his life. From organizing a truck-load of blood to be delivered from Austria to Transylvania (without the least idea of why his driver backed out – “Count Dracula” is a historical figure, not a vampire, in Romanian culture) to learning English by hanging out at used car lots, he has lots of material. His ambition, however, is to make his experiences count at a time when American values are embattled in some parts of the world. “I would like to present the perspective from another country of how good it is here”, he said.