The "Iosif Vulcan" troupe of the Regina Maria Theater starts the new year with a project dedicated to teenagers, which will premiere on January 17 and 18, at the Great Hall: awakening by Doru Vatavlui, directed by Bobi Pricop. The show features teenagers and actors from the band "Iosif Vulcan" and brings to the forefront a topic that is still partially in the taboo area of public debate: deepfakes and bullying among teenagers.

The Regina Maria Theatre's approach to constantly welcoming young spectators from high schools and gymnasiums continues in 2026 through reading performances in schools, stagings of texts from the school curriculum, and by including in the repertoire productions that address pressing themes for this age group. awakening is a natural part of this journey, proposing not just a show, but a framework for reflection on a digital reality that teenagers experience daily, often without real protective tools.

„"The Awakening" follows the story of Amalia, a 16-year-old student at a prestigious high school, caught between the need for validation, the pressure to perform, and the invisible violence of the online environment. The announcement of her qualification for the national stage of the Romanian Olympiad sparks an avalanche of reactions, but not on the high school's page, but in the unmoderated and uncontrollable parts of the internet - culminating in a compromising image that begins to circulate among her classmates and on the city's gossip pages.

Amalia is suffocated by the consequences: shame, isolation, verbal aggression, public stigma, distrust from adults and the inability of institutions to intervene. The play, written for teenagers and performed by teenagers alongside their real parents, follows the collective reactions of peers, families and teachers, revealing a social mechanism in which responsibility is diluted and blame is constantly shifting. Built as a polyphony of digital voices and intimate confessions, "The Awakening" is an X-ray of adolescence in the age of social networks and artificial intelligence, a show about losing control over one's own image, about the fragility of identity, about how thin the line between real and fabricated is when technology becomes a weapon and about what happens when maturation takes place more in the cloud than in the body.

The choice of a teenage girl as a victim of digital sexual exploitation is no coincidence. According to a 2023 report by tech startup Security Hero, 98% of deepfakes identified online are pornographic, and 99% of these victims are women. The same report indicates a 550% increase in the number of deepfake videos between 2019 and 2023, most of which are pornographic material generated without consent. Furthermore, many such apps and platforms are not trained to create images of male forms and do not require age verification processes for either the creator or the subject of the image, which opens up the possibility of producing material that simulates the sexual abuse of minors.

These numbers do not describe simple statistics, but real teenagers, who go to school every day and are exposed to a digital ecosystem that operates faster than adults can understand or regulate it. Amalia's drama in awakening This is not an isolated case of fiction. In recent years, cases of deepfake porn involving teenagers have exploded internationally, almost always following the same pattern: public images taken from social media, transformed with the help of artificial intelligence into sexually explicit content and distributed rapidly, without consent and with no real possibility of being stopped.

In June 2024, in the Australian state of Victoria, a teenager was arrested for allegedly creating and distributing fake explicit images using the faces of about 50 female students at a private school. Authorities described the material as „extremely graphic,” and the victims’ families spoke of severe psychological effects: anxiety, panic attacks, shame, social withdrawal, difficulty concentrating, and dropping out of school. The case sparked a national debate about the vulnerability of teenagers in an under-regulated digital environment.

A similar case, which took place in Spain in 2023–2024, in the town of Almendralejo, led to the sanctioning of 15 teenagers involved in creating and distributing fake nude images of their classmates. The investigation showed that many of the victims did not initially understand what was happening to them, but they quickly felt the effects: stigmatization, isolation and loss of a sense of safety. In 2025, Spanish authorities imposed a fine in a case of distributing AI-generated sexual images involving minors, marking an important step in recognizing deepfake as a form of abuse, not as a „digital hoax”.

Romania is not immune to such situations either. A high-profile case took place in Arad, where a student shared fake explicit images of a classmate's face, made using a deepfake platform, and later publicly exposed her phone number in a school space, amplifying the humiliation and harassment.

Doru Vatavului's text captures with painful precision this mechanism by which a teenage girl's life can be radically changed with a few clicks. awakening It is not about an exceptional case, but about a plausible one, which has become almost commonplace through repetition. It all starts with a seemingly harmless post. From a single image, a double is born: a body that no longer belongs to the real person, but which bears their face, name and identity.

The directorial concept signed by Bobi Pricop amplifies this theme through a stage construction that creates an almost cinematic experience. The action takes place mostly in Instagram discussion groups, and the stage is dominated by a screen. The teenagers and the actors are in the hall, among the spectators, and the audience has access to live feeds and phone cameras. The Internet is not a backdrop, but the very environment of the characters' existence. They do not "go online" — they are already there, in a space where violence no longer needs direct contact to produce trauma.

The show's strength also lies in its refusal to offer a single, convenient culprit. Evil is fragmented, distributed, and normalized: in the gesture made "in jest," in the silence of colleagues, in the inability of adults to understand technology, in delayed institutional reactions, and in the online chorus that judges, comments, and sexualizes.

#desetvatarea digital education campaign

In parallel with the rehearsals, the digital education campaign #despottarea #fiideepsafe #deepaware is being carried out on the social media accounts of the Regina Maria Theatre, addressed to teenagers, parents and teachers. The media literacy campaign associated with the show is not a secondary gesture, but a necessity, starting from the reality that deepfake works not only based on bad intention, but also on ignorance: of the technical mechanisms, the legal consequences, the psychological impact and individual responsibility in the digital environment.

The campaign aims to explain, in accessible language, what a deepfake is and how it can be created, why sharing a false image represents a form of violence, even if it is "not real", and to provide concrete tools: what to do if you receive a deepfake, how to stop sharing, how to report it and how you can support a victim.

Along the way, the dialogue will be complemented by interventions from key experts in key fields: psychologists, who will address the emotional impact and trauma of online exposure; lawyers and magistrates, who will explain the legal implications of creating and distributing deepfakes; and digital education experts, who will translate technological mechanisms into accessible language. The goal is not to moralize or instill fear, but to provide real landmarks in a territory where the consequences are often ignored until they become irreversible.

Related event "Panel_TABU – Silences that cost teenagers"„

The dialogue proposed by awakening starts right before the premiere. The day before, the Regina Maria Theatre organizes Panel_TABU – Silences that cost teenagers, a host event for the conversation that the show will continue on stage.

Organized in partnership with the Bihor County School Inspectorate and Drugaș' Club, the panel brings together representatives of the educational environment, artists, psychologists and cultural journalists, in a setting that encourages the exchange of perspectives on digital violence, the deepfake phenomenon and the real communication difficulties between adolescents and adults. Choosing theater as a venue creates a different context than the school or institutional one, in which sensitive topics can be addressed without the pressure of evaluation.

The dialogue does not end with the premiere. After each performance, the audience is invited to discussions with the artistic team, transforming the theatrical experience into a process of continuous reflection.

Through this extended structure, the Regina Maria Theatre positions itself awakening not just as a theatrical performance, but as a framework for public conversation about topics difficult to address in another context.