class="">The Glass Garden

The novel is written in the first person, from the perspective of the main character, a young female obstetrician working at a clinic in Bucharest. She attempts to piece together her life from the fragments of memory that come to her in disorder.

The play centers on Lastochka (Swallow), a seven-year-old orphan adopted from a rural orphanage by a Russian woman. The girl is brought to Chișinău and raised in the courtyard of a Soviet-era apartment block, an environment that becomes both her school and her social world. The courtyard is a microcosm of society: children and young people, the elderly, the defeated, the suffering, the angry, and the resigned. Although the orphan is entirely subservient to the woman who raises her, she resists attending a Russian school, which would have guaranteed her social advancement and superiority, even though Russian eventually becomes the language she speaks better than her mother tongue.

Lastochka’s loneliness within this human collective, paired with the unhappiness of the adult woman she grows into, reflects the cyclical impasse of an individual trapped in repetition: social decline, failure, and unfulfilled potential characteristic of the post-imperial human condition. The fragility of a glass world that never became crystal, the shattered destinies of individuals, the human and economic crises, and the collapse of values themselves become characters on stage.

Photos: Ian Onică