Heart and other meat preparations

Synopsis

About love and the coloured dust that comes from it. About the labrador butterfly that struggles in vain at the end of reality. About unintentional humour and voluntary loneliness. About truth, tenderness and sex. About children, poetry and coffee. About the body and how it carries the load. About small crises erupting in crisis. About beauty and about increasingly dry souls already hardened at the edges. About pleasure and illness. About language and how colour drains out of things. About inner couples. About the life that hangs inches outside us. About the heart and other meat dishes. - Dan Coman

Chronicles:

"Pandemic times are, for Coman and Afrim, not a cause, but a litmus, a potentiator of personal crises, a generator of gestures and contextual solutions - they are false connections whose dissolution is accelerated by the pandemic. (...) For Afrim and Coman, the pandemic is a social crisis, with unsuspected individual effects, a couple and family crisis, in which the desire to survive, the vital impulse of sexuality and the need for love fights with the new, the unknown, distances, loneliness, voluntary or involuntary abandonment. (…)
And the story of Drosofila, and the role played by Raluca Păun, as the 37-year-old teacher, alone, apparently with a debatable dose of retardation, a much clearer dose of depression and a deep self-hatred (dominantly bodily), are absolutely exceptional (the monochord interventions of the parents' couple complete a landscape of society's failure in front of the most vulnerable). The story is one of abuse and the embodiment of that abuse, and its unfolding in small steps is fascinatingly controlled by the actress. In the role of the professionally isolated doctor's wife and mother of a child passionate about repeating the same drawing endlessly, with an existential need to be held, Romanita Ionescu maintains a delicate balance between fragility, despair bordering on psychosis and repressed-exposed sexuality, a charming exploitation of her availabilities of bodily and poetic expressiveness. A show about survival, resistance and failure in exceptional times couldn't help but talk, above all, about women."
(Iulia Popovici – Our life has changed. Will we survive? / Cultural Observatory, no. 1034 / Oct. 9, 2020) https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/viata-noastra-s-a-schimbat-vom-survivetui/

"Heart and other meat preparations" by Dan Coman, directed by Radu Afrim at the "Marin Sorescu" National Theater in Craiova is a show like a love story: with candid enthusiasm, with games created by the intelligence of children from Poznań, with humor cynical, with bittersweet self-irony, with betrayals, with silences that cry out their helplessness, with crises, with depressions, with anguish, with memories preserved in perfect images, with serious accidents that mutilate souls involuntarily and a gentle happiness that makes meat dishes . (...) Raluca Păun achieves the most complicated conversion from the humor of the roaring laughter that he provokes in the hall with each line to the tragedy of a child's soul tortured in repeated rapes, exposed with the same serenity, as tonic, but with an inner tear which freezes the bitter smiles under the spectators' masks.
(Alina Epîngeac - Essay about love, beauty, "Heart and other meat preparations" / Amfiteatru / Oct. 7, 2020) https://amfiteatru.com/2020/10/07/eseu-despre-iubire-frumos-inima- and-other-meat-preparations/