class="">ZOOM BIRTHDAY PARTY by Saviana Stănescu

ZOOM BIRTHDAY PARTY by Saviana Stănescu

29 noiembrie | 15:00 – www.fnt.ro

The show has been available for online viewing from Sunday 29 November 15:00 till Tuesday 1 December 15:00.

After just 2 weeks of pandemic quarantine, I received an interesting challenge from an experimental theatre in Ithaca,  a little university town in the state of New York, where I teach dramatic writing and contemporary theatre. I was asked to write a short play about that very moment, the time of the pandemic. The same challenge was sent out to other 5 playwrights, from different parts of the world: Santiago Loza in Buenos Aires, Iva Brdar in Belgrade, Rebekka Kricheldorf in Berlin, Jorgelina Cerritos in San Salvador, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon in Ithaca.

SEE OTHER EVENTS ON THE SAME DAY

Romanian translation: Saviana Stănescu

With: Helen T. Clark, Joey D’Amore, Elizabeth Mozer

Directed by: Sam Buggeln și Beth F. Milles

Technical Manager: Jennifer Schilansky

Video Design and Live Mixing: Noah Elman

Duration: 20min

Producer: The Cherry Arts Inc, Ithaca, New York, 2020

English performance with Romanian subtitles. 

We all got to work and wrote short plays that were subsequently inter-connected in a virtual performance called Felt Sad, Posted a Frog (and other streams of global quarantine), directed by Sam Buggeln and Beth F. Milles. This title mas surely meant to bring a little bit of humor and make sadness in quarantine more bearable.

I wrote Zoom Birthday Party, a play that takes place in real time, on Zoom – it’s the birthday of a Romanian student in New York. Her younger brother lives with his grandma in Oești, a village in the Argeș county. Their mother is a carer for an elderly man, somewhere in Italy. The money she makes is spent to support her family. We know well how often such situations happen in Romania… I also play with the Dracula stereotype – the Americans know him oh-so-well – as I love to challenge the US audiences a little bit with my immigration plays, pushing the familiar to the unfamiliar and absurd, to present the tragicomedy of immigrants’ lives.

Romanian spectators are invited to see Zoom Birthday Party, translated by myself, with the original cast– Helen T. Clark, Elizabeth Mozer, Joey D’Amore. (…) – Saviana Stanescu (fragment of a text published by Scena.ro, New York Puzzle column)