Balkan Dreams/Western Nightmares – An exploration of the American Dream/Nightmare in Plays by Romanian Women Playwrights

Abstract

This article is an exploration of the aesthetics of exile in works by three Romanian women theater artists: Aglaja Veteranyi, Saviana Stanescu and Domnica Radulescu. I focus on the closely‐knit relation between the experience of exile and the theatrical aesthetics that emerges in the construction of different
versions of the American dream often turned nightmare. The arc of the study stretches over the intersections between gender, ethnicity, nationality as
embodied in the practice of theater from the vantage point of displacement and fractured identities.