On stage, off stage, same emotions

Did I ever tell you I am a film person? No? Really?
Well, I am a film person, and not a theater person. And this is why...

....
I got out from the Girl in the Rainbow show almost running. I had two reasons, my cardigan that I inadvertently left outside, on a row of white plastic chairs, where the evening concerts were to take place and the theatrical performance itself. It was the second monologue theatrical show that I have seen this year at C’art Fest(ival) and it was almost too much for me.

The festival programs its plays in a variety of places, but the monologues are always in the Cristian school. An old school, with a large room upstairs, frescoes on the wall, recently uncovered, left open, and, of course, a wooden flat floor. So you need to do a bit of a waiting in front of the school, to get to that place that is neither too... in front, nor too... in the back.

The ones in front are, somehow, too exposed. The specific thing, in monologues, is that the actor or actress has no partner for the so necessary eye contact. They talk to you, with you, towards you. They lock their eyes onto a spectator, and, according to the strength of that spectator, they hang in there for a while.

I found myself, on the second row of chairs, at the extreme left, caught in such a lock for several times, at Girl in the Rainbow. And, although it seemed almost impossible to stay there, given the dramatic tension of the moment, I did, like the good teacher I am, stay, scaffolding the actress and helping her to build up the next moment.
Little did I know that each and every eye contact of this kind was really followed by a strong moment; that the actress would go as far as crying. The story required it, I guess.
But while staying there, for the second play of this kind in the festival – the first one, Why Does the Child Boil in Polenta?, by Aglaja Veteranyi, with Edith Alibec, was also a monologue and was equally troubling to me, but this one, The Girl in the Rainbow, by Lia Bugnar, with Ilona Brezoianu, stretched my limits.

Was it the feminine version of the childhood, the troubled childhood in both plays – Veteranyi’s being autobiographical? Or the sheer performance of both actresses, ranging from the sweetest candor to the edge of despair? I don’t know if my emotions were boiling due to the words chosen by the autresses or by the locking eye contact; by the unconfortable subject, the unconfortable position of the actress on stage, so close to us or the unconfortable position as spectator to such a great range of emotions.

But it is too much, to the point of giving up going to the theater, giving up altogether the witnessing of other people’s emotions.
Emotional as hell. Our inner one.

The fifth edition of C'art Fest took place in Cristian, a beautiful, Saxon-style village at the heart of Romania, near Braşov.