Bulgarian actor Yasen Peyankov says he didn’t presume much when he moved to America nearly seven years ago. Back in Sofia he’d been a salaried player in a theater troupe sponsored by the communist government. Within his first five months here, he was cast in a play. Then he learned he’d be working for free.
“It seemed like a microcosm of racial problems in America,” Goulding says. “All the guys outside freezing their butts off were African-American or Hispanic. All the guys working inside were white, sitting in their nice comfortable offices. The temperature outside got so cold flesh would stick to cars.”
But in America, theaters must become commercial enterprises. Our culture is dominated by Hollywood, Peyankov says, because Hollywood has money—it pays its actors. Over the last five years European Repertory Company has battled the odds, earning a unique reputation among off-Loop theaters for its ambitious but uneven efforts (all financially supported in part by Goulding’s and Peyankov’s regular jobs). Now the group has come into its own, weathering hard times and negative reviews to claim a string of successes and one bona fide hit. Its expressionistic take on Steven Berkoff’s Agamemnon has been running for nearly two years—quite a feat for a serious play, a story that’s not about hairdressers, nuns, cabdrivers, or cannibal cheerleaders. With the show approaching its second anniversary, critic Lawrence Bommer marvels, “The success of Agamemnon is unprecedented in off-Loop theater. It’s a demanding play. It shows young audiences are ready for the classics and new kinds of European theater if you can find the way to tell these stories.”
The Gouldings lived in a public housing project. “Not only were the houses all exactly the same, the whole layout was the same. They’d come ’round and decorate your house for you, whether you liked it or not.” He says the neighborhood was known as a “triple security zone,” requiring three times the normal number of police for the area. But Goulding claims the police were there not to protect residents but to maintain the status quo. “When we were kids, we’d go up to the border of our district and look at the middle-class homes. If we had crossed over, the police would’ve picked us up.”
“It sort of clicked,” Peyankov says. “But nothing came of it at the time.”
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Yasen Peyankov, 32, was the only child in a comfortably middle-class family. “My mom was an accountant. Dad did a lot of things. He was in advertising, sales. He managed a bread-manufacturing company.” When his father died in 1985, Peyankov was 21 years old and in the military, a time he describes as “the darkest period of my life. They took two years and wasted them. Mom wanted me to become a navy officer. She almost had a heart attack when she learned I wanted to be an actor.”
Communism was crumbling in central and eastern Europe, and in June 1990 Bulgaria would have its first free elections in two generations. “For 45 years we had been ruled by communists. Everybody was very hopeful. It was like the air was just charged with the anticipation of change.”
