This month at Reactor, we are thrilled to kick off the season with a highly anticipated premiere, the show "The Dream," which brings together the largest artistic team in the history of our collective! Alexa Băcanu is the wonderful mind behind the script, written after an inspiring period of research, and she is excited to reveal more to us about her creative process for this exciting project.

Right now, I am simply enjoying watching how and to what extent the only play I wrote this year comes to life on stage! And, as usual, I am taking mental notes—what I did well, what I did wrong, what I could have done differently. So for now, I am not researching, but evaluating. Which, you could say, is still a part of that constant, professional research we all do. At the same time, "The Dream" features many of the themes that passionately interest me and that I keep returning to. I won't list them all, but I believe they all have to do with exploring the narratives that shape us, control us, and keep us captive.

What changes when the theme is so current and sensitive is just how responsible I feel to tell this story in the best possible way. And because I don't know exactly what "best" means in this case, discovering everything as I go, the process is a bit more challenging than if I were writing about something entirely fictional or with lower stakes. I constantly have to pause and ask myself if I am heading in the right direction, if my statements are fair, if I am doing anyone an injustice, or if the tone is just right. I truly believe that when other people's stories depend on you, this reflection is a must—though sometimes you have to pretend to forget it for a moment, otherwise you would never finish!

The fact that this text is for a musical forced me into a wonderful essence and directness that was absolutely needed here. And I think it also inspired me to place greater trust in my amazing colleagues who work on the text after I have mostly finished my part. It is no longer just a directorial vision that I rely on to help the play reach its full potential; in this case, I practically have eleven talented musicians as co-authors! I felt as though I only wrote half of the text, and that it isn't truly complete until the music beautifully fills in the gaps. To capture that perfect atmosphere we wanted—that ambiguous, hazy, and confusing zone we learned about during our research—we absolutely needed the suggestive power of music!

I believe our project, "Safety Zone," which includes "The Dream," has already made a wonderful impact through its activities so far! The show comes as a perfect complement or perhaps a fresh perspective, unfolding the theme and looking closely at certain aspects under a magnifying glass. It will certainly reach those it directly addresses—our beloved theater community. But I would love for it to reach a broader audience too, because the things we talk about do not belong exclusively to the theater world, and I think we all need to ask ourselves from time to time if our "normalcy" is truly normal. An educational or social system based on fear, dominance, and humiliation can be found everywhere. The tendency to attach moral value to overwork, to treat a woman's body as public property, or to discourage and punish individuality and critical thinking is not exclusive to theater or drama schools. Will it manage to change something concrete? That is indeed the big question I keep coming back to, especially as theater makers, and particularly when we feel a bit cynical. I believe expecting a single artistic work to change the world is a bit too much to ask. Our show is part of a much larger, beautiful process of questioning the world we live in through all kinds of artistic means, and together with all the other elements of this process, yes, I believe it will spark change—if not right now, then over time! It is a journey of gathering and sharing stories, ideas, and questions that need to be heard, seen, and understood. And it is my firm belief that stories have the power to change the world—which is exactly why we must treat them with love and responsibility.

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