SOURCE: "Two Visions of 'A Lost Letter'," in Romanian Review, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1972, pp. 103-108.

In the following essay, Popovici compares two productions of A Lost Letter, the standard rendering at the I. L. Caragiale National Theatre in Bucharest and an alternative version mounted at the Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra Theatre in 1971.

Every culture possesses in its classical zone, icy cold peaks to which pilgrimages are undertaken, and burning hot sources, permanently connected with present-day circumstances by all manners of bridges and channels. For Romania, A Lost Letter, a comedy of manners by Ion Luca Caragiale—a playwright and prose writer, a basic author due to the conception and means through which he asserts the specific national, comic spirit—is a burninghot source of this kind.

The life of this play is a somewhat odd phenomenon; acted almost permanently, it draws full houses—from schoolchildren to pensioners, who listen to a...