The FAB Community has been a marvelous context of questioning relevant themes and subjects of nowadays realities together with other playwrights, in different languages, thus creating not only an artistic field of exchanging ideas, but also a political field of debate. Because writing for theatre means writing actively for a vivid world, FAB Community became a vital space of interactions where words can build up new possibilities of imagining what we sometimes do not dare to imagine.
Mihaela Michailov
Mihaela Michailov holds a PHD in Theatre Studies at the National University of Drama and Cinematography I.L.Caragiale, București, where she coordinates the Master of Playwriting. Mihaela Michailov is a playwright, a performing arts critic and a cultural educator. She is one of the co-founders of the independent space Replika Center for Educational Theatre, based in Bucharest, where she initiated, together with the other members, platforms of educational art, programs of cultural intervention, shows on themes related to education. She has written more than 20 plays focused on social and political themes: work force migration, relations of power in the educational system, marginalization of vulnerable categories in post socialist times, history of LGBTQ+ communities before and after 1989. Her plays and fragments of plays have been translated in Bulgarian, French, Hungarian, Italian, German, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese. She has taken part, in 2009, in the playwriting residency offered by Royal Court Theatre, London. Her play „Bad Kids” had a public reading in July 2014 at the Festival d’Avignon. The play was staged in Bulgaria, France, Luxemburg, Germany. In 2016 the play was published at Solitaires Intempestifs Publishing House. In 2022 and 2013 she is the main curator of the National Theatre Festival, together with Oana Cristea Grigorescu and Călin Ciobotari.
Google My Country
A text that explores the borders of racism, the stereotypes that determine our daily behaviours. One of the main questions raised by the play is: where these stereotypes come from?
Why do we consider „the other” quilty for all the bad things hapenning around us? Why do we consider the Roma people responsible for the degraded image of our country?
The play is conceived as a collage, gathering in a fragmented structure, scenes focused on political racism, quotidian and apparently harmless racism and the racism proper to various TV and radio broadcasting.
From an early age, kids are taught that if they are not nice, the „gipsy” would come and steal them.
From an early age, kids are taught to be afraid of the „monstruous” gipsy.
From an early age, kids are taught that the gipsy is inferior. Because he steals. Because he lies. Because he stinks.
In a time where the others are considered rejected human dregs, the play opens a debate about a territory of constructed fears and political extremism.
Momlovesyou
„We are all migrants”, says one of the characters of the play.
The text gathers stories based on various interviews with domestic workers – Romanian women working abroad. The play focuses on their conditions of work, on the relations with their employers, on the abuses they are sometimes submitted to, on their intimate relations with their families, on the harrowing longing for their children. Torn between the need to earn more money and the need to be close to their families, the migrant women imagine ways of empowering themselves and others in similar conditions. The text explores common stories of survival and engaging in political change, documenting what means to belong to a common Europe. What is Europe today from the perspective of those who are always on the road, rejected and humiliated while the public discourses tend to assimilate and integrate them? What is the story of integration from their perspective?
COPII RĂI (Bad kids)
This eleven year old girl won’t stay put. She plays with rubber-bands in class as the teacher speaks. She plays as if she were a free kid. She dreams of giraffes and cannot sit as still as her classmates do. Her mother has moved her to yet another school because she does not fit in. She’s not a leading student. Not a productive kid. Something of a misfit. The history teacher handcuffs her with the coloured elastic bands she’d been playing with during the lesson about democracy. The educator who teaches about democracy disciplines the little girl in an aggressive and authoritarian way, restricts and restrains her. Violence creeps over to her classmates. They emulate their teacher’s conduct and attack the girl. The class teams up to silence their classmate. The girls falls silent. She stops dreaming of anything. Tomorrow her mother will remove her to yet another school. But which school will allow her to remain herself: an unsubdued, free child?
Bad Kids is a play about violence and submission. About imagination being reprimanded as it dares express itself. About rules and abuse which weigh down on the children’s freedom.
Bad Kids is a one-woman-show in which the actress performs the several social parts each of us plays in this increasingly brutal society where school mirrors the dynamic of the adult world we live in.
Bad Kids is a play about the education system in Romania, about the shapes violence can take when apparently harmless discipline-keeping turns into a collective threat and about the balance of power among teachers, parents and schoolchildren.
PROFU’de Religie (Our religion teacher)
Our Religion Teacher critically views the way Romanian schools treat religion: religion classes encourage black and white judgment, things are either good or bad, true or a lie. Religion classes favour a punitive behaviour: whoever believes differently deserves to be disciplined. A thirteen year old student questions her religion teacher on the essence of truth: Is there a generally valid truth, or does everyone have their own? Is belief in God beyond doubt, or do students have the right to have their individual way of believing in values and principles? The student accuses her religion teacher of having touched her knee. Teachers are divided on the subject: some believe she is lying, some believe her. Her classmates also disagree: some believe their religion teacher touched her, some don’t care, some don’t believe their teacher would do such a thing. The girl’s mother protests against a school system which tolerates such an incident. A chaotic TV-debate deals with the role of religion in school: is it necessary? What is the best way to teach religion? Who benefits from religion classes? The text quotes current religion manuals read by a narrator and tells the story of the young student who accuses her religion teacher of inappropriate behaviour.
Capete infierbantate (Heated Heads)
Heated Heads brings to public consciousness an episode of living history. Not long after the 1989 Revolution, on 13-15 June 1990 Bucharest is invaded by miners, which together with the forces of order intervened in force against protesters in University Square and the civilian population. It was considered the bloodiest, most brutal as style and scale of all miners actions. The project is based on a documentation process by various methods: interviews with witnesses, press articles, reports of various institutions and organizations, debates, public discussions, workshops, centered around the events in Bucharest in that period. The truth about these events is the sum of points of view, often contradictory and impossible to reduce to a single perspective, presented through the voices of seven participants directly involved in the events.
Family Offline
Roles: 4 kids: 3 brothers and a sister, an elder brother.
Inspired by the phenomenon of massive workforce emigration (which left more than one quarter of a million children alone at home) “Family Offline” tells the story of four children taken care by an elder brother, overwhelmed by his responsibilities.
They grow up preserving their innocence and, at the same time, learning by heart who they have to be: parents in the bodies of kids. Kids who accidentally start fire in the house, come late at home after cutting at a finger in order to prove they are brave.
Are these children the new parents of a world where tenderness is replaced by gifts? What kind of world do we build through the fragile imagination of children in search for absent parents?