Teatrul de Stat Constanta

THE CHERRY ORCHARD

Liubov Andreevna Ranevskaya returns ruined, together with her daughter, Anya, to her family’s country estate, after several years spent abroad. The family no longer has the money to maintain the property and, in order to save their home and escape their debts, they must sell the cherry orchard, an act that is at first refused, but gradually accepted. Russia at the beginning of the 20th century is undergoing profound social changes, and the aristocracy, along with its hedonistic lifestyle, is on the verge of disappearing.

Andrei Măjeri, theatre director: “THE CHERRY ORCHARD proposes a reading of lives turned theatrical, a world in twilight. A collective ghost and a field of contradictions, a crossroads and a territory of the marginalized, Chekhov’s orchard is a final dance before disappearance.
At the State Theatre of Constanța, I found the ideal place to tell our Orchard. I imagined a capsule-space, where the audience is immersed in the atmosphere of the house. Like a wardrobe-house, this place of passage is a space of silence, a cosmos of complicity. I called it THE CHEKHOV HOUSE. It carries marks of churches, of ships, of trains, ultimately revealing the ever-changing morphology of ‘the children’s room.’ Over the years I gathered small revelations about a potential staging of this seminal text: the audience on four sides, suitcase-floors, the bundles of Act II, the atypical appearance of the protagonist, the cultural clash between those who left and those who remained, and so on. Liubov Andreevna enters here as a stranger returning home, each element triggering painful memories. The children’s room is a room good only for dying in. In the hidden corners of this collapsing house, the family’s balance slips through her fingers. With a troubled past and an uncertain future, she behaves like a dethroned monarch, capricious and Bovary-like. Her acting is always ‘through tears.’ A queen cannot renounce being a queen, even in utter ruin.

And yet, the position of ‘main character’ is not firmly established, the place is instead occupied by the complex, profound, and irresolvable relationships among all the characters. Their consciences, stirred by questions and moral revolts, create permanent tremors. These exiles of fate seem to wear out their lives in speaking. Urgency drives them all: of faith, of returning, of status, of buying the orchard, of paying the debt, of falling in love, of luck, of social climbing, of changing the world, of love, of sleep, of death...

Their inner worlds are turned inside out, back and forth, here where the walls are us. Here, nothing is stronger than what has been saved. Here, you can cast one last look at the past, with a smile.”

THE CHERRY ORCHARD

MACHINAL

“Machinal” offers a theatrical reflection on the relationship between the individual and the social mechanisms that regulate work, family, and intimacy in a world governed by efficiency and conformity. Adapting the play written in 1928 by American journalist and playwright Sophie Treadwell, the production directed by Diana Mititelu brings together actors from different generations of the Constanța State Theatre ensemble, alongside young collaborators, and explores from a contemporary perspective the condition of women, shaped by intimate relationships and the social pressures that regulate their existence.

ALL MY SONS

In an America seemingly at peace after the Second World War, the Keller family appears to have survived every hardship. But beneath the calm surface of suburban life, a devastating truth simmers. Larry, the son who went missing on the front, is still awaited by his mother, Kate, who refuses to accept his death. Meanwhile, Chris, the younger brother, tries to build a future with Ann, Larry’s former fiancée.

Ann’s return to the Keller home sets off a chain reaction: long-buried secrets rise to the surface, and the respectable image of the father, Joe Keller, begins to crack. Behind his success lies a decision made during the war, a choice that cost human lives.

ALL MY SONS

ORLANDO

Orlando, a young aristocrat in the Elizabethan age, magnetic, restless, and eager for experience, embarks on a journey that defies both time and identity. Over the course of centuries, he moves through love affairs and shifting social conventions, until, in a moment wrapped in mystery, he becomes a woman.

The heroine continues her life in a world revealed through new rules, new limits, and new expectations. The same being, yet with a rewritten destiny, Orlando encounters both the freedoms and the constraints imposed by gender, discovering just how fragile and arbitrary identity can be.

Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation transforms Virginia Woolf’s celebrated novel into a poetic, playful, and strikingly contemporary performance in which time flows fluidly and the questions of who we truly are gain renewed urgency. It is a story about transformation, love, and the freedom to exist beyond any label.

ORLANDO

Incendies

„I am not telling you a story; I am telling you about a pain that fell at my feet.” After the death of their mother and her bizarre will, a pair of twins—a boy and a girl—raised in the West embark on an initiatory journey through their war-torn homeland in the Middle East. They search for a father and a brother whose existence they had known nothing about.

A stark performance about survival, the human condition, social trauma, lives shattered by violence, confronting the horrors of war, people turning into beasts, and others turning into a silent song.

RELATIVELY SPEAKING

There are: four people, two interchangeable couples, a lot of confusion, a lot of entanglements whose consequences are prolonged to the maximum. The result: a classic comedy for the whole family.

"Relatively Engaged” (original title Relatively Speaking) is a comedy that extracts fun and mirth from the betrayals of marriage and love relationships, and especially from the entanglements they produce.

A marital quadrangle whose variable sides are presented from ever-surprising angles to provide the audience with amusement and an optimistic and positive image, in a paradoxical and ultimately wise way.

Alan Ayckbourn's play is one of the British playwright's greatest successes and has been staged at numerous theatres in the UK and the US, with several screenings and television adaptations.

MACHINAL

THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA

Bernarda Alba decreed that reputation must be defended at all costs, even at the expense of the happiness of the eight women locked behind the walls. The barred windows only allow the illusion of freedom, and money is at the heart of the planned marriage between the most desired young man in the village and the oldest of the sisters. And if love has blossomed in other hearts, it is merely a symptom of freedom, which must be eradicated from the very start in the concentration-like space created over the centuries by the oppression of women through patriarchal traditions.

The House of Bernarda Alba is the final play in what commentators refer to as Federico García Lorca’s "rural trilogy," alongside Blood Wedding and Yerma.

The author’s general subtitle is "A Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain." To tell this drama, Lorca sets the scene in a house in Andalusia where the strictest mourning has been imposed, no men remain, and the matriarch Bernarda Alba exerts dictatorial control over her five daughters, her elderly mother, and the servant. Conformity, obedience, fundamentalism, and the repression of emotions cannot, however, last forever, in the face of the volatile and ever-changing nature of femininity, with love, passion, courage, rebellion, and self-sacrifice. The aspiration for love and freedom inevitably crashes against the unyielding walls of the House of Bernarda Alba.