Photoshop

Photoshop it's the story of misunderstood or betrayed loves, and the title of the piece is given by the name of a computer application that allows photo editing. Cutting and compiling images to get one that takes on a different meaning. The play applies the same procedure through simile: images = stories. Various scenes from everyday relationships between people are processed: parents-children, husband-wife, attractions and rejections, etc. The scenes take place in a mall, in a psychology office, at home, in a car, in a bar, in a gym. A daughter becomes cynical in her relationship with her mother who only demands obedience, because society makes her that way. A son loses patience with his decrepit father and revolts against his mother's obedience. A girl loves but is not loved and her insistence brings aversion. And despair makes her stop paying attention to anything, giving her body without choice. A man understands that he is no longer loved but remains rigid in the relationship. A man is the image of a superficial society, but he sees and speaks what others, deeper ones, cannot. A woman must admit that she deceived herself by staying with her husband. A man and a woman, who seem to have nothing in common, end up discovering that they can give each other what they lack. A man who discovers all these images begins to join them, associate characters from one image or another and writes a story. The disparate images, the lives of the characters thus acquire a meaning.

Photoshop it's a double love story, a story about choices made in haste, about disappointments and personal limits, about relationships with parents who know nothing about their children, but it's also the story of the birth of a writer. Who writes a love story. Deliberately thrown into the air and reassembled from tiny fragments, arranged seemingly at random, the story is rebuilt from the disparate photographs in which its protagonists appear. Following a principle already established by the films of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 21 grams and Babel, as well as by others, the author further reduces the fragments of the story, which are no longer scenes, nor sequences, but photographs of certain moments - those essential moments in in which the protagonists make decisions that change the course of their lives (not coincidentally, the woman in the middle of the two love stories is a photographer). In addition to the story, the reflections on the authenticity of the contemporary creative act, of the mediated testimony that loses its "truth" by becoming an image corrected in photoshop, i.e. a counterfeit of reality, are interesting. On the other hand, a chance to turn a mundane existence into something worth remembering. A way to give meaning to a life lived without a conscious conscience.

Cristina Modreanu – New voices, a new generation: The Comedy Theater is thinking about the future, December 1, 2010