Text author: Mircea Morariu
Taken from Yorick.ro

A confession by Tuncer Cücenoğlu, the author of the play Avalanche, published in the hall notebook of the Oradea show, clarifies that the writing is based on a real fact. Which the playwright learned about sometime in 1987. Somewhere, in Eastern Anatolia, there is a small town, surrounded by mountains, where people are forced by laws with strong infusions of prejudice to speak in a whisper. At least a few months a year. Not because they hold who knows what secrets that must remain that way, but to protect themselves from the danger of an avalanche. Three months a year it snows heavily in the area in question and any uncontrolled noise could be the cause of a catastrophe.

But that's not all. The imminence of the avalanche has left its dominating, strange, unnatural mark on the entire life of the inhabitants of the settlement in question. On mentality, on everything that public and private life means, on the intimacy of being. Even weddings and births are scheduled according to the respective natural given seen as a fatality to which people respond through the fear that dominates their being and with a set of draconian behavioral norms whose strict observance is watched over by "committees and committees" whose "conduct" is of the purest medieval origin.

Tuncer Cücenoğlu's play captures a moment of crisis, an exceptional situation whose resolution would require the activation of a "red code" of exceptional cruelty, the observance of which is the responsibility of the village midwife and the council of elders. Any birth outside the rigorously established annual intervals must be stopped, two lives, that of the mother and that of the child, are required to be sacrificed, in order to save the lives of the other members of the community. Whoever opposes the rules in question pays for his audacity with the price of his own life.

All these elements of a cruel reality allowed the Turkish playwright to write a play about expectation, prejudice, cowardice and fear. About the consequences of coming to terms with fatality, about the humiliation and unnaturalness of helplessness and about what it means to challenge/contest everything that means rules that restrict the freedom of the human being. Avalanche it is a parable play, a manifesto play, a call to reason and normality.

All these ideas-forces are found in the show staged at the "Regina Maria" Theater by director Petru Vutcărău. The characters speak in whispers, the stage is covered by an immense, hostile, unfriendly white, which has little in common with true purity. We, the spectators, are also invited to wear white coats, who, thus, become part of the scenery. It is signed by Ianis Vasilatos. The show is conceived on the border between realism – it is given consistency by the representatives of a family caught at the crossroads, people generically called The Young Man, The Young Woman, The Man, The Woman, The Midwife, as well as those of authority, in my opinion a bit thick, much too similar in appearance to people Klu-Klux-Klan-or of some barbaric communities, the result being a demonstrative, excessive thickening, to the "fulfillment" of which the costumes created by Amalia Buie contribute - and unreality (the ghosts of those who, in distant times, paid for the guilt of not respecting the dogma). The big problem with the editing is that it did not identify solutions that would protect it from the danger of monotony. It is not very convenient to hear only whispers for more than an hour, it would have been necessary to find additional means, visual and auditory, to suggest oppression, fear, depersonalization. Attitudes to which the revolt of the young man who saves his wife, the unborn child and gives the community the chance to regain confidence in itself and in life is unexpectedly imposed. I appreciated, in this sense, the solution of the green, of the lifting of the iron curtain, of the perspective towards the hall, towards the place where the child is, understood as a symbol of life.

The actors, with a few exceptions, the most prominent of which is that of the Young Man, well played by Ciprian Ciuciu, interpret attitude-characters rather than people-characters. And here I think that additional nuances, iridescences would have been required. That is, something other than voices and gestures. I wanted more than a strangeness on an imagistic level. I was expecting those elements that would convey the effort of censorship to which feeling, humanity are subjected. In the frames set by the director, Petre Ghimbășan, Corina Cernea, Consuela Egyed, Șerban Borda, Gabriela Codrea, Mirela Lupu, Andrian Locovei, Anca Sigmirean, Nicolae Segărceanu, Georgia Căprărin, Alin Stanciu, Ion Ruscuș, Cristian Segărceanu and the child Ionică Lianu-Popa do their duty honestly.