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 contextual gestures and solutions - they are false links whose dissolution is accelerated by the pandemic. (...) For Afrim and Coman, the pandemic is a social crisis, with unspeakable individual effects, a couple and family crisis, in which the desire to survive, the vital impulse of sexuality and the need for love struggle with the new, the unknown, distances, loneliness, voluntary or involuntary abandonment. (...)
Both the story of Drosophila and the role played by Raluca Păun, as the 37-year-old, lonely teacher, apparently with a questionable dose of retardation, a much clearer dose of depression and a deep (body-dominant) self-hatred, are absolutely exceptional (the monotonous interventions of the couple of parents 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. As the wife of a professionally isolated doctor and mother of a child passionate about endlessly replaying the same drawing, with an existential need to be held, Romanița Ionescu strikes a delicate balance between fragility, despair bordering on psychosis, and repressed-exposed sexuality, a charming exploitation of her availability for bodily and poetic expression. A show about survival, resilience and failure in exceptional times could not fail to speak, above all, about women."
(Iulia Popovici - Our life has changed. Will we survive? / Observator cultural , nr. 1034 / 9 Oct. 2020) https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/viata-noastra-s-a-schimbat-vom-supravietui/
"Heart and other meat dishes" by Dan Coman, directed by Radu Afrim at the Marin Sorescu National Theatre in Craiova is a performance like a love story: with candid enthusiasms, with games gorned by the intelligence of mischievous children, with cynical humour, 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 obliterates meat preparations. (...) Raluca Păun achieves the most complicated conversion from the humour of the roaring laughter she provokes in the audience with each line to the tragedy of a child's soul crushed in repeated rapes, exposed with the same serenity, just as tonic, but with an inner heartbreak that freezes the bitter smiles under the spectators' masks.
(Alina Epîngeac - Essay about love, beauty, "Heart and other meat dishes"/ Amphitheatre / 7 Oct. 2020) https://amfiteatru.com/2020/10/07/eseu-despre-iubire-frumos-inima-si-alte-preparate-din-carne/