Cultural Encounters. Or How to Handle Being Snowed - In Bucharest Version.

Exams. Going to school every day and spending most of it there. Feeling the high school air linger through the desks. Bad cheating. Subjects you would write papers on but you only have half the page for space. The laziness of borrowing another sheet of paper.

On the other hand, SNOW. A lot of it, all of a sudden. Practically the first snow of the winter. Closed the hidden path that takes us all home for the weekend. Frost. Blizzard. Yum. But how were three students supposed to handle this?

Thursday night. Bulandra Theatre. Crossing the street from the subway to the theatre was totally worth it. In a really cold, but wonderful hall the three of us witnessed ‘Endgame’, a play written by Samuel Beckett, in the Theatre of the Absurd style. From the characters’ dialogues, shouts, monologues to their costumes and the play’s art direction everything was more depressing than absurd, but majestic at the same time. Seeing a favorite actor of mine (Razvan Vasilescu) play on a stage instead of on a screen was a revelation. I had visions of Oblomov, Kin Dza-Dza and the Irish interiors depicted in ‘Angela’s Ashes’ throughout the entire play. I left the theatre to face the blizzard feeling resuscitated from a long sleep. My own private sleep of reason, of conscience.

Friday night. The National Theatre. It was only two of us left to face the cold and glass ice covered by misleading snow. As you know, in times of blizzard, you just take the subway. So we walked from the subway through the small park at the University’s Place, passing the crowd (a 100 people max) who was still annoyingly shouting antigovernment phrases. It wasn’t like I didn’t care about them, I just wanted to be inside and see the one play I had been waiting to see since it’s premiere in 2010 – ‘The Avalanche’, written by Tuncer Cücenoğlu and directed by Radu Afrim, a young but creative director, famous all over Europe for his controversial plays (München loves him). With surreal images, the set was a wonderful warm white, with touches of gray. The story is about a village who takes a lot of precaution measure to avoid an avalanche which would kill everyone – the ceiling is all lace, the chairs and tables are also covered in it, the doors and floor are covered in fur, women give birth taking into account the snow. Everyone whispers. The echo is dangerous and the atmosphere is almost magnetic, sick, heavy. I think I clapped for ten minutes straight. On the way home we were both just high, pumped, talking only about the play and how we would go see it again.

Saturday night. The Jewish State Theatre. Four people walk towards the theater until they can’t even feel the skin on their faces anymore. When you can’t raise your eyebrows, it’s too cold. We enter an intimate small theatre, the smell of fresh coffee imprinted the walls. They hand us headsets for translation. This was the first shock of the night. Yiddish…This building was actually the first Jewish Theatre in the world so that place has a special meaning. We walked into a small beige room, where the walls have small golden flower patterns coming down on the walls. The smell of heavy seats and silent walls – ‘It smells like communism in here’. We plug in and watch a sweetened version of ‘King Lear’ where the themes are moved into a Jewish context, and the emphasis is on the decay of the family and its small dramas. Another pleasant surprise, except for the intonation of the woman who was translating.

Exams. Snow. Theatre for three days in a row. Hot coffee. A beer. Some loud music. And we go back to studying. And getting on with our lazy lives. And promise to have pleasant surprises again soon within a theatre’s walls.

Stay open. Allow mesmerizing.