"This text is a manual on the rise of dictatorship in society, meticulously exemplifying the tropes of tyranny, a landscape play about dictators disguised as saviors. Richard, a prodigious criminal, narcissistic and violent, unleashes a mechanism of terror. Thus, the non-hero becomes, for a time, a leader. As now, perhaps in a hundred or a thousand years, Richard will continue to appear before the spectators, explaining to them step by step the forms of corruption in their own reality. And the spectators will watch with bated breath all the facts they have been warned about and will do nothing. They will promise themselves, perhaps, that the slippages they are experiencing will not be repeated. This is why we chose to imagine a scenic universe with no temporal definition.

"Hope Never Goes Up in the Elevator" brings to light a conflict that has become more acute in the context of today's world: that between the old world vs. the new world.
A single, elderly woman is placed in the care of two androids, specially programmed for this mission. However, the androids, at first, cannot fully understand the woman's needs, because their thinking is analytical and they cannot perceive the emotions and spiritual needs of their subject.
However, in the end, everyone benefits from this confrontation and there seems to be a trace of reconciliation between the two worlds.

Statistics say that the main cause of migration is generated by socio-political factors: persecution, war, conflicts. Elif flees at a young age from terror and threat, hoping to find a place where she can regain her right to exist, the fundamental right to be human.

But the mirage of freedom gradually turns into a struggle for validation, and she discovers how fragile the border between freedom and oppression is. The balance tips from political to economic dictatorship, and her fight for survival is gradually swallowed up by a Kafkaesque immigration system.

The fragile salvation lies in mythical thinking and the power of stories, like Scheherazade, but cynicism and cruelty throw the cruel weight of reality into her story, especially when she is put in the position of protecting her daughter.

"Elif and the Rain" is a contemporary fable about perseverance, the fight for justice and integration into an absurd bureaucratic system, but also about family, about the bond between an emigrant mother and her daughter born in the borrowed country, who live two different experiences of the same story. 

The text seems necessary to me precisely because we live in a society in which individualism is the main ethical imperative, in which the Other has no value except to the extent that it can represent a means to achieve profit. I chose this text because it presents the immigrant's condition from two perspectives. The personal, human one, of the fears, of the torture given by this situation in which it is < > to exist in a place, of love, of searching for a < >, of the ways in which Elif colors this alienating existence. And the other, which is the political perspective, of man who is only worth as much as he can produce. Of man as a tool of labor and nothing more. And especially, of a bureaucratic system built to ensure that someone like Elif will never be able to obtain the rights necessary to overcome the condition of a simple tool of labor, will never be able to live as a human being. (Alex Ianasi)

Distribution:
Elif: Anda Tamasanu
Lily: Carina Bunea
Owner: Ioana Dragos Gajdo
Son: George Dometi
The worker: Sorin Ionescu
Woman: Denisa Irina Vlad
Policeman: Eugene Neag
Recorders: Corina Cernea, Angela Tanko, Giorgiana Coman, Mihaela Gherdan

Directed by: Alex Ianasi
Scenography: Tinatin Gobejishvili
Music: Ovidiu Iloc
Lighting Design: Vlad Lazarescu

Premiere date: December 21, 22, 2024
Show duration: 2h

Show recommended for people over 14 years old!