Text taken from Contributors.ro / author: Mircea Morariu

Theater Queen Mary from Oradea has recently enriched its repertoire with a new, good and exciting show called Rabbit Hole. It is based on a skillfully written play by the American David-Lindsay Abaire. Who, after being rewarded for it in 2007 with the prestigious Pulitzer (Abaire also received other awards), he turned it into a film script. A 2011 film that was released in our country under the rather uninspired title Awakening to reality. Film directed by John Cameron Mitchell and which brought Nicole Kidman, who was a perfect fit for the female lead role, a nomination for Oscar.

Text taken from Contributors.ro / author: Mircea Morariu

Under the title of a famous American film starring Jane Seymour, Christopher Plummer and Christopher Reeve, a film that miraculously arrived on Romanian screens in the suffocating, practically hopeless 1980s, the Theatre Queen Mary from Oradea offered its spectators the opportunity to see a performance of the play Almost, Maine of John Cariani.

I will not attempt to explain the reason for the change of title in the following. I will only note that the stories in the 8 modules of the show take place in an indefinite time, but the place where they are consumed is specified as clearly as possible. That is, Maine, a rather bizarre locality, with a society and social life that are not exactly organized, located where the map is pinned.

Text taken from ancazaharia.ro / author: Anca Zaharia

After my move from Brașov to Oradea, I didn't regret anything, but I often said that I missed theater, so I started the project of familiarizing myself with this world in the city where my new home is. As you know if you've read me before and as you're finding out now if you haven't, I share what I like and I think others might like it or, on the contrary, cause change in those whom it can put, from the comfortable seat in the hall, in not-so-comfortable positions, with the potential to generate some reflections as a glimmer of hope for self-education and tolerance. 

Because it seems vital to me that we draw some conclusions that will make us at least a little more decent people, not just remain passive and giddy consumers of any cultural, artistic or entertainment product. If you want and can, or at least want to be able to, you have something useful to learn from Las Fierbinți (which Diana, my colleague from GOLAN Magazine, wrote about, here) and from some show with love islands or parent swaps. Okay, for this you need some skills that we don't really learn in the traditional educational environment, because God forbid the child interprets something according to his own mind and doesn't babble the eternal comments learned by heart from grandma's collection of comments.

Text taken from contributors.ro / author: Mircea Morariu

For many years, certainly many over 30, I have tried to explain to successive series of students that the French 17th century is neither (or is not only) the Classical Century, nor the Great Century, nor the Century of Louis XIV. That all these labels only partially cover its historical, artistic, philosophical, aesthetic and literary complexity, and that once criticism and literary history have discovered the beauties and delights of the Baroque, and have also found a good part of its preciousness (as opposed to the ridiculousness in which it failed), it would be appropriate to set aside many of the statements in the old textbooks, products of academics from the old Sorbonne tradition and from the old criticism. After all, rules, order, balance dominated only part of the century in question.

Text taken from bookhub.ro / author: Oana Cosma

In 1973, even for the French, homosexual concubinage was a taboo subject. Jean Poiret, author The cage of the mad he knew this when he took over the idea from 1966 of a British man and developed it in an original way in his own play; he himself played one of the two homosexuals (Georges, the director of the cabaret shows with transvestites at the nightclub he owned with his partner for more than a decade). Even today, in 2023, the subject is not approached openly, lightly, not even in communities where homosexuals exist. Accepting sexual minorities represents a great challenge for many of us, but members of this minority also struggle with their own prejudices: the shame of being part of a "blamed" minority, the doubt that torments some of them their whole lives: are they really homosexual or not?; the precariousness and uncertainty of a stable daily life generate real dramas among them. Jean Poiret, as a man of the theater, a consummate artist, did not set out to play the moralizing wolf, but simply to bring a sensitive subject before the audience, in a constructive, funny, comical manner. I think the result surprised even Poiret himself: The cage of fools It is performed in many countries, over and over again, perhaps because, being so well written, it allows the lines to be adapted according to the specifics of the country or place where it is performed, as well as the names and features of some of the characters.

Text author: Mircea Morariu
Taken from: contributors.ro

Mimi Brănescu is an actor by profession. More of a film actor than a theater or television actor. But above all, at least in the public's consciousness, he is the screenwriter of the sitcom Las Fierbinți. Mimi Brănescu is also an industrious author of plays. Plays that are not necessarily supported by action, but by lines. Savory, intelligent, that provoke laughter without being even a single vulgar moment. The Oradea public was able to see this almost two years ago when the playwright himself descended on the local Regina Maria Theater as a director. He did it to stage his own writing called Genul acustativ. They can also see it in the current season when the new theater, Transylvania, is playing Mimi Brănescu's The Last Ones. A kind of Home to Dad and especially a kind of Country Life, in a different way.

Text author: Mircea Morariu
Taken from contributors.ro

The Regina Maria Theater in Oradea officially opened its new season with a recap of the previous theater season's productions and not only (Vinnegar Tom, Genul acustativ and Opera de trei parale were thus able to be seen again), with a premiere or, more correctly, with a complete restoration of a show originally produced in the independent environment (Pâna când moartea ne va desparți), but also with a mini-festival entitled Portret de autor. Dedicated to a highly successful trilogy by a French playwright who is by no means minor. On the contrary. Currently in great demand on Romanian stages. It's about Florian Zeller.

Now, to be fair, the festival was more of a crisis, if not necessarily a rescue, in any case. A prosperous city and county where we are told to the point of oversaturation that everything would run smoothly thanks to someone who is more sunny than Louis XIV and more thirsty for megalomaniac constructions than the Genius of the Carpathians, Oradea and Bihor do not really have, unfortunately, the resources to support the return to life, after the pandemic, of the oldest short theater festival, which over time became FITO. That is, the Oradea International Theater Festival. Other, and not culture, but, at best, subculture, popular manifestations are the priorities of the authorities in whose pen the allocation of funds is. It seems true to the saying How beautiful is our country/Whether Wednesday, or Thursday/There is no such thing as existing/Citizens with sad faces.

Text author: Claudiu Groza
Taken from tribuna-magazine.com

Probably any history of theater made during the "pandemic", as it will be called in years to come, will have to record – as a piquancy or relevant element – some of the artistic/technical solutions found by artists for their creations. A surprising variety, as we will soon see.

For his staging of Alan Ayckbourn's The Snake in the Grass at the "Regina Maria" Theatre in Oradea, Sebastian Lupu has resorted to a marking of sanitary convention: the show is performed with strict observance of social distancing. The three actresses play three meters apart, with a discreet but visible minuet of permanent spatial reconfiguration, but the illusion/sensation of their proximity to the point of touching is created through a skillful video montage (Ovi D. Pop). The show has been broadcast on YouTube several times since its premiere, being performed with an empty hall, obviously. The convention is also present as a precise stage sign, through the central circular cordon, with yellow strips on which the code of the new influenza virus is written, much like in the investigations in detective films.

Text author: Prof. Țiț Emanuela
Taken from liceuliuliumaniu.ro 

Undoubtedly, this period has made us long for our daily activities. We confess that we miss the theater. Today we write about our last outing to the theater.

„"Explosive" – a play dedicated to young people, teachers, parents. These were the words through which the play was presented to us. Curious, we decided to participate in this performance.

Surprise! We woke up at school again. What does the show Explosive present to us? Enthusiasms and reality. Our soul is a crushed glass of doubts and interrogations. The play is an invitation to stirring dialogues with ourselves. Willingly or unwillingly, during the show we end up asking ourselves sincere questions and, perhaps, even looking for an answer. It is not easy to find the strength to open your soul to those around you, but it is often very important. We are also reminded, through a dramatic episode, how important it is, for us in turn, to pay attention to our loved ones. To listen to them. To strive to perceive reality, to open our eyes wide in order to be able to analyze what is bad and what is good.

Text author: Mircea Morariu
Taken from amphitheater.com

A new translation made from the perspective and in accordance with the intentions of the show (signed by Elvira Rîmbu), a director with a consistent, honorable and hopeful calling card, a director who, by the way, is not at his first encounter with Gogol's text (Petru Vutcărău), a spectacular, dynamic, energy-generating set, and numerous spaces that intelligently and efficiently value almost all the kinetic and expressive possibilities offered by the revolving stage (Adrian Damian), a set enriched by the remarkable contribution of light design (Bogdan Gheorghiu) and video creation (Ioana Ilaș-Badale), by a scenic movement that is itself efficiently elaborated, with a clear focus on spectacularity, a movement from which images are created in which realism merges or sublimates into the fantastic (András Lóránt), a large cast with a successful coordination of group moments, with several well-performed roles (Șerban Borda, Eugen Neag, Pavel Sîrghi), others who would have had the chance to be like this if their queen had been found and especially preserved (Răzvan Vicoveanu, Sebastian Lupu, Alexandru Rusu).

Text author: Maria Hulber
Taken from LaPunkt.ro

In the vision of the young director Alexandru Weinberger-Bara, Miss Iulia, the naturalistic drama by playwright August Strindberg, staged at the "Regina Maria" Theater in Oradea, subtly glides towards an impressionism of forms and colors, with psychological inserts not at all foreign to the explorations of the human soul initiated at the end of the 19th century. But the dramatic work turns out to be only the pretext for the sublimation of some strong characters, remarkably interpreted by the actors Anda Tămășanu, Sorin Ionescu and Lucia Rogoz, for theirs will be the entire stage, which has become a battlefield of egos, of couples who slowly and torturously devour each other. In an original prologue, the entire tension of the drama floods the horizon of expectation of the spectator left breathless in front of the symbolic duel between Miss Iulia and Jean, imagined as a Russian roulette.

Text author: Maria Hulber
Taken from LaPunkt.ro

Postdramatic theatre today knows some of the most unusual forms. By this formula – postdramatic theatre – we do not necessarily refer to the meaning of directing games and stage languages, as often unconventional transpositions of classical scenarios, but to the emergence of intertexts capable of reinvigorating already established models. A number of contemporary dramatic authors propose interpretations in a personal register, materialized in as many new creations that connect to a tradition of broad artistic inspiration. William Shakespeare is, from this point of view, the most offering playwright, provoking a continuous authorial dialogue that transcends time and space. From an extensive list of titles, more or less glorious, let us mention just a few of the recent and noteworthy ones, namely the plays of the trilogy În inima noptii, staged by Gavriil Pinte at the Regina Maria Theatre in Oradea, based on scripts with inserts by George Banu and Monique Borie. Moreover, it is not only the dramatic text that knows such rewritings with essayistic extensions or touches of parable, but also epic works. (See the case of the thriller Macbeth by Jo Nesbø, a noir novel recently released in Romanian bookstores and inspired by the Shakespearean masterpiece of the same name). Thinkers on the dynamics of theatrical forms have often reflected on this return of theater to itself, to its roots, reinforcing them with an ideological contribution cut from the issues of the contemporary world. In the collective volume Le Théâtre postdramatique. Vers un chaos fécond?, Jean-Marie Valentin rightly observes that, ”La question du présent dans son rapport aux origines est une interrogation permanente du théâtre sur lui-même.”

Text author: Răzvan Rocaș
Taken from LiterNet.ro Agenda

Text author: Silvia Dumitrache
Taken from observatorcultural.ro

Avalanche, the dystopia of Tuncer Cücenoğlu, the most famous contemporary Turkish playwright, professor of drama at MSM (Müjdat Gezen Art Center) in Istanbul, is one of those stories that haunts you long after the curtain falls. I saw a production for the first time after Avalanche in 2012, at the TNB, directed by Radu Afrim, an unforgettable show through the force transmitted, in discrepancy with its entire poetic, diaphanous universe, one of the most terrible messages: that we ourselves create our prisons, and the most feared guards become our own fears. I was happy to see in this year's FNT selection a new staging of this play, directed by Petru Vutcărău, a production of the "Regina Maria" Theater in Oradea, because this text, with great scenic potential, is a nuanced metaphor both for the contemporary world, which has not escaped the danger of totalitarianisms, and for something, perhaps, even more fearful: the inner monsters, which make us close ourselves in a world of preconceptions and superstitions, a world of fear.