Text taken from Várad Magazine | author: Fried Noémi Lujza

show „"The Awakening"” was presented on January 17 and 18 by the Iosif Vulcan Troupe of the Regina Maria Theater in Oradea. The production, directed by Bobi Pricop based on a contemporary text by Doru Vatavlui, was followed, each time, by discussions between the creators and the audience.

The show has a double cast, so at the Sunday performance we saw, actor Sorin Ionescu addressed the audience before the start, warning that the play's language is vulgar and contains many English expressions — exactly as teenagers speak today. However, during the show, there are also moments that are more shocking than the vulgarity...

The play deals with an extremely sensitive but very current subject: the story of Amalia, a student who also achieves good results at the Romanian language Olympiad, but about whom pornographic images appear on the internet. For public opinion, it becomes almost irrelevant that the images are fake, made using the so-called deepfake; a veritable tsunami of rumors and humiliation begins.

The viewer's experience is equally captivating: in front of the stage is a huge screen on which the characters in the theater hall, whom we rarely see directly, are projected, as if in a live performance. The teenagers communicate with each other through various applications on their computer or phone, through video calls. We see live how they talk to the school psychologist about what happened — and how, turning their backs on him, they share what they really felt in those situations.

The story unfolds on several levels: we see the conversations between Amalia and her friends, as well as between the boy who takes on the responsibility of making the deepfake images — during the show we also find out who the real author is — and his friends; we see the high school gossip page that triggers the scandal, influencers who give their opinions, as well as the school and police press releases, which suggest helplessness. The reactions of the adults are telling: the girl's mother, as a first impulse, hits her and confiscates her phone, laptop, etc., although, in reality, she is not the one appearing in the photos; or the boy's father, who repeats that, if he has admitted it, he should take responsibility for the act, even if he did not commit it, "and then it will be resolved somehow"... At the same time, the drama brings us face to face with ourselves, whether we are teenagers or adults, because we see daily how rumors spread, how emotions get out of control and how virtual space turns into a toxic place — sometimes even because of a deepfake image or video.

As rumors intensify, prejudices erupt and more and more fake images appear on the so-called suggestive website. onanists.ro, the two young people come to realize that they like each other: their embrace at the end represents a small victory against the misery that pours down on them.

For me, the most shocking moment of the show was not the vulgar language, nor the fast pace of the online environment or its dark sides, nor the powerlessness of the authorities. The most shocking moment was when the show briefly becomes interactive and two questions are asked of the audience. The first: who knows what it means deepfake — and I'm glad to see a lot of hands raised. Then comes the second question: who knows a young person in a similar situation — and again, one by one, the hands go up… and this is terrible to see, especially after, throughout [the show], we are repeatedly confronted with the fact that adult society does not know how to handle the deepfake problem.