AMOR, a play with actors and marionettes, opened the international EUROmarionettes 1994 festival hosted by the Transylvanian town of Arad, under the auspices of the local Puppets and Marionettes Theatre and its gracious manager and stage director Ion Manzatu, Tudor's only university classmate and long time friend. Tudor was invited to act as the Artistic Director of the festival, an experience he cherished in fondness. AMOR actually started as an extension to Shakespeare's "Love's Labors Lost", a set of  exercises of moments without words to open the play and continue throughout. Years later I was invited by my friend Ion Manzatu to direct a play for the Puppet and Marionettes Theatre he managed and the theme of impossible love under the careless edicts of the powerful came to mind. I imagined a world where the marionettes rule, and the humans want to love and be loved. It was not a direct overtone, but the parallel to the former ways of the communist regime we lived through were not lost on the audiences. And it did stir debates, for some were still feeling at the time we should let go of the past and concentrate on the future. The challenge, to create a play with actor and marionette interaction, was doubled by the necessity of doing so without words, and the only discourse in the play was the use of the word "amor" and the final spoken "edict". Everything else just happened, with actions and sounds moving the play forward. It was a great experience to mix actors and marionettes, and a great extension of the creative might to imagine a word without words, but still meaningful.  It was a lesson in improvising on the moving visuals, while carefully building a story. The most rewarding feel was opening the play in front of an international audience of puppeteers, and then interact with producers, directors and actors of an ancient yet novel craft that gives so much to the modern interpretations of stage theatre. The learning experience, beyond the success or failure of my own play, was unique, and the performances of the festival were uplifting.