Article taken from LiterNet.ro / author: Liviu Ornea

A couple mourns their four-year-old son who died in a stupid accident: the dog ran into the street, a young man tries to avoid it and kills the child who had run after the dog. No one is to blame. It happens. Fate. Eight months after the accident, the parents have not recovered. Each reacts differently. They become estranged. The wife almost cultivates her pain and refuses to communicate with her husband, her sister and mother, her friends who, even they, do not know how to react, she becomes aggressive, accuses everyone of not understanding her pain. The husband tries group therapy, rejected sine die by his wife and has a small affair. In the end, they decide to sell the house (the wife's idea). She tries, not to start all over again, but at least to learn to live again.

The play acutely analyzes the transformations that prolonged mourning operates in the psychology of the two. Their relationships with other family members and friends (who do not appear, but are named). It is a good quality psychological study, a piece of writing in the vein of great American drama. With, unfortunately, a slight yielding to Hollywoodism. Rabbit Hole (literally, "rabbit hole") won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The author, David Lindsay-Abaire, was thirty-eight years old. In 2010 it was adapted for the screen by John Cameron Mitchell, starring Nicole Kidman in one of the leading roles (the wife).

As in many of his other performances, Vlad Cristache, in the production at the "Regina Maria" Theater in Oradea, with the "Iosif Vulcan" troupe, hid behind the actors with whom, it is clear, he worked wonderfully. On a huge, rather empty stage, with a few scenographic elements (Andreea Tecla) that recall the missing child (a very beautiful, brightly colored inflatable room), in a light that was almost always strong and in a musical ambiance that was a bit too strong for my taste (but certainly to the liking of many other spectators), the actors evolved with precision, safety and effectively filled the space.

Georgiana Coman perfectly embodies the younger sister, a funny wimp, full of natural charm. The actress perfectly plays the teenager with the verbal tics of her generation (it's Cristache's specialty, by the way), not going to church and free-spirited. However, the absence of inhibitions allows her to say many uncomfortable truths and be a kind of reasoner. Georgiana Coman builds a character who is restrained. And the relationships she establishes with her mother and older sister are, in turn, well-defined.

The mother of the two girls, Gabriela Codrea, plays an important role in the unfolding of the drama. Having also lost a son, she finds herself in a kind of competition of pain with her eldest daughter, who refuses any comparison. Her character is excellently constructed, with a calculated reluctance, a mirror of the daughter's future. The monologue towards the end is splendid, spoken with the simplicity required by the situation, in which the barrier erected by the daughter seems to fall and the daughter asks, if not for help, perhaps for advice, at least for information about her mother's pain ("Will it ever pass, mother?" "No"). It is one of the merits of the actors (and the director) that they do not fall into melodrama, they avoid outbursts and the entire show is built in a serious key.

The grieving parents are Răzvan Vicoveanu (yes, yes, that one…:)) and Alina Leonte. Their acting seems subordinate to the relationship that must be established between them. They represent two almost complementary ways of experiencing the loss of their child. Both tense, tense, but he is more willing to go out into the world, she is closed in on herself and exacerbating her flaws and tics as a young mother. Alina Leonte, dressed in a black suit, almost always maintains a stony figure that the rare smiles towards the end make all the more dramatic. Vicoveanu, black trousers, white shirt (the two always seem as if they have just had a funeral), is almost always restrained (in speech and gesture), always willing to bend to his wife's ideas, with one or two outbursts. Both achieve true acting performances, in the line of a Stanislavskian realism, fully assumed.

There is another character – in the text and on stage. The young man who was driving the car. He appears in two scenes, he wants to talk to the child's parents, he also went through a difficult time, he blames himself – but he doesn't want absolution from them, as the father thinks. He dreams of being a writer and has written a science fiction story that he dedicates to Danny, about parallel universes that one reaches through a Rabbit hole and where Danny himself could continue to live – it's the syrupy Hollywood passage that I would have preferred to see cut by Cristache. He is received by the mother, the scene is touching, through the flawless performance of Tudor Manea (good idea to make him slightly clumsy) and through the generosity of the mother, which was difficult to intuit until then. I repeat, it could very well be missing, nothing was lost.

Fortunately, there is no happy ending. Only hope, uttered with difficulty, stumbling, with fear, by the spouses with their backs pressed against the background wall of the stage. Just like in life.

Wonderful acting show. Tough, uncomfortable. And yet you leave feeling good.