stage manager: Ioan Negrea
lights technician: Jenel Moldovan
sound technician: Marius Rusu
prompter: Alina Forna
Based on the eternal symbiosis between art and life, Heller's text is a demonstration of the power of theater in its often traumatic confrontation with reality. A team of actors is preparing a generic performance about war, and their performative frenzy gradually builds until the fiction assaults the last redoubt of the concrete world, which in turn struggles to re-establish its dominance over the stage. Kept on a short leash by the intransigent presence of the Major (Ovidiu Crișan), through the intermediary of the hesitant Captain Starkey (Ionuț Caras), all the actors in the squadron know that it will be their turn to fly kamikaze planes over randomly selected cities, which must be destroyed for unknown reasons dictated by the enigmatic laws of war. Order and discipline, however, are dynamited by Sergeant Henderson (Matei Rotaru), who simply refuses to play his sacrifice after the seemingly real disappearance of a fellow cast member. Director László Bocsárdi explores the ambivalence of the theatrical act, exposing the fragility of our condition as spectators, not only in relation to the stage fiction, but especially to the present next to us, from which we have learned to detach ourselves "like at the theater." In a dynamic staging, full of dark humor, the story of the actors lost in the roles of soldiers makes us as an audience responsible of a history that besieges us.
