ovita's classical training and her solid foundation in the Commedia dell' Arte form gave Colby students opportunities they might not otherwise get, says Josh Scharback '98, who played the pivotal role of the father in Six Characters. "It was great to get a different viewpoint." Beyond the technical theater experience, though, students drank in Iovita's passion for the theater and were mesmerized by her tales of acting, directing and day-to-day living in Communist and post-Communist Romania. "As an artist, as a human being, we just loved her," Sharback said.
"We had a very keen censorship [in Romania]," Iovita explained in a Maine Public Radio interview in which she promoted the Colby production and talked about her life and work in Europe. "I'll give you an example of a play that couldn't get approval to get into production--Macbeth; because it dealt with power and especially with women taking power. The dictator's wife was the problem in this case.
"An old actor from one of my productions told me, `Look--make sure you do something outrageous on stage, like have a woman taking off her clothes. Then they will pick on that and you can finally yield and say, "Okay, I give it up." Then the political content will pass.' And that was absolutely true," she said.
The Communist Party succeeded in creating a faux art culture that was dominated by propaganda, Iovita said. And, as a graduate of the prestigious Film and Theater Academy of Bucharest and a director in various state and national theater companies, she admits to having served that propaganda culture. "We had to teach it," she said.
"But under communism," she said, "theater was the last refuge for artists of all kinds. Despite the propaganda and censorship, it was the only place you could grapple with the truth, because the number of people you reached was so small. We were convinced we had to preserve honor through the arts. I can say we had a good life because of that; it was a great spiritual atmosphere--we had something to fight against."
The material atmosphere was something else, of course, and neither the spiritual nor the material world improved much in the post-communist era. "They're just second-rank Communists who want Western money," she said of the post-Ceaucescu regime. All the talk is pure demagoguery--and nothing works."
Iovita told of keeping chickens in her small apartment, raising them for an infrequent feast. Unlike Americans who work at other jobs while pursuing a career in theater, "In Romania you can't be a waitress in the daytime," she said.
David Spiro '99 said her accounts of life in eastern Europe were part of what he learned from working with Iovita. "You can read Time magazine, you can read The Christian Science Monitor, but the stories she tells about Romania are just incredible," he said. After hearing how she and her husband participated in the overthrow of the Communists in the late 1980s and how brutal life was and still is there, Spiro said, "Stuff like that kids in the U.S. just can't fathom. We take so much for granted."
Ultimately, though, it was her concern for her students, both in the theater and in their personal lives, that endeared Iovita to cast members and other students she met at Colby. Several students maintain a steady correspondence with her and have been to Boston to meet her son and her husband, Adrian, a Ph.D. candidate in math at Boston University.
And when Richard Sewell and Performing Arts at Colby produced Hamlet at the end of the first semester, Spiro drove from Waterville to Boston in the winter's first snowstorm to pick up Iovita and bring her to Mayflower Hill for the Friday night show. "I gained a mentor more than a professor," said Spiro. "She's awesome." 

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