AT THE EQUINOX THEATRE,

A POETICAL PERFORMANCE

    A few days ago, the Equinox Theatre opened its season with the performance „Torna umbra”, written, stage designed and…sung by the inexhaustible Mihai Vasile.

    Like the other things the director did before, this is also a less usual performance, a combination of poetry and intense visual images, ingeniously sustained by a complementary musical background. The author aims at two coordinates, which intersect almost constantly: one of metaphysical nature, exploring the expressive value of the gesture, and another one, deeper this time, which appeals to the mythological sense of the Romanian existential symbolism. But where is the word? Well, the word is not so important anymore. The poetic theatre that is performed here is a merging form that consists of similar elements, with idiomatic value. Yet, the actors are speaking. Along the twelve poems, the actors utter some words, pulled out, it seems, from the primal phase, when the Romanian language was on its way to formation.

    Yet, the archetypal semantics comes from gesture and resonances as well. This way, a performance comes to life, and it transfers the energy and the prerogatives of the word to the expressive conduct of the actor. By acting the actor says everything, or almost everything, about the torture of waiting, of love and birth, about alienation and incapacity, about trusting the power of Jesus Christ, as well as the implacable fatality of stepping to the other side. What bounds these ideas–states concentrates in the words „piatra”(stone) and „umbra” (shadow). They charge, constantly, with a new combustion and a new connotation, according to the inner narrative course of the performance. The success, or maybe the stake in this performance, coherent in its intentionality resides in its author’s will to turn to good account ideas and feelings, objects and states from Romanian ancient times, that many people forget or simply ignore. It is a laudable step, to which, with total abnegation and understanding, the following actors adhered: Suzana Marin, Ion Streche, Emilia Dan-Vasile, Elena Rusu, Adrian Stan, Valentin Muşoiu, Andreea Ţuică, Monica Buzoianu, Nicolae Stoica.

 

    Nicolae Dumitrescu

    (publicist)