Cosmin Stănilă: Fun creepy facts and, at long last, the end!

We are constantly thinking about what we are working on and we want to share it with you too! We believe that the bond between creators and spectators continues long after the show has ended, and we'd love for you to discover what's on our minds when we create, what challenges we face, and how the magic you see on stage comes to life. That is why the #blogreactor section brings you texts, collages, and thoughts straight from the artists behind the creative process.

Cosmin Stănilă has been a guest actor at Reactor since 2018. We can't quite remember if it was before or after he joined the Cluj National Theatre, but what is certain is that he is usually busy splitting his schedule between the two theatres, which makes every single chance we get to work with him an absolute joy! Since our very first collaboration on the show "Not Us, Never", Cosmin—affectionately known as Coco—has remained by our side in various ways, most recently as a resident playwright for Drama 5 and then as a stage dramaturg for the wonderful play "All the Things That Alois Took from Me". We have been eagerly awaiting the premiere of the show "Finally the End" since 2019, and now, finally, the time has come!...

I dreamed I woke up with a baby at Reactor. My baby. It was a funny-looking baby with a big head and a face far too mature for its age. And with one eye more closed than the other. It will open up, someone told me, it just takes a bit. I felt nothing for it except a little shudder at the closed eye and the hope that it would grow a bit handsomer, with a slightly smaller head. It had snow on it; I had forgotten its stroller out in the snowfall. I pulled it under the eaves and brushed it off. I didn't really know how to push the stroller. Then, it stood up and started to walk! It asked me if it was doing it right. Is this how you walk? Yes, that's how you walk, I said. It stopped. How do you walk? it asked me. And then, it just couldn't walk anymore.

A few days before we finished working on our show Finally the End, I posted this online. I didn't go then to look up in The Interpretation of Dreams what exactly a funny-looking baby with a big head and a mature face and/or babies that speak even though they are too small might mean. I didn't search then, but I visited www.vise.ro just now and it playfully revealed this to me:

Funny-looking babies indicate minor quirks of character.

A crawling baby suggests that you will be able to act and think on your own.

And that's pretty much where my psychoanalytic investigation wrapped up, leaving me to happily conclude that I have minor character quirks (what on earth do you have to dream of to realize you have major character issues?) and that I can think on my own. Right up until I realize I'm thinking on my own. After that, that's it, I'm stuck!

When I had the dream, I interpreted it much more simply – the show was to blame! Since in Finally the End I play the role of an expectant father – I hadn't even realized I was at the age where that's quite plausible – the scenario probably just snuck into my mind and played out at night. I was quite happy that my subconscious was doing the work I was too lazy to do consciously – my dream could just as well have belonged to the character. Except for the part about being at Reactor, of course. That would have been a bit too meta! Adam – his name is actually 'Him', but one day we decided to give him a friendlier but equally generic name – really wants the child, but that probably didn't spare him from those classic fears like "oh goodness, what if I can't love it?" Spoiler alert: Eva (meaning 'Her', the wife of 'Him') is the one who has even bigger doubts about bringing a child into the world.

Because of the Woman, the leader of an anti-humanist sect (whom we will call Lily from now on), Eva starts to question the ecological impact of having a child. Not Him, though; he's a down-to-earth guy who doesn't listen to that kind of nonsense. That's just Him. I, on the other hand, don't really know what to say, I think I'm a bit more easily influenced. Fortunately, I'm far too young (and immature!) to seriously contemplate having a child. The only choice where the ecological argument weighed in at all was whether to get a car or not, but even then, it probably didn't weigh more than arguments like well, parking in Cluj is a nightmare anyway, and riding a bike is much nicer and healthier. My daily life isn't dramatically affected by the planet going to ruin – I try not to use straws and (too many) plastic bags, and that's about it. But Lily's perspective certainly makes you think! In an American play called Lungs, there's a line that goes something like: I could fly to New York and back every day for seven years and still not leave a carbon footprint as big as I would by having a child. Ten tons of carbon dioxide. That's the weight of the Eiffel Tower. I would be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower. The girl in Lungs has a point. If we really thought about the well-being of the planet, we would stop multiplying. We would make do with the bare necessities, as Lily says at one point in the show. Just like the cheerful song from the Jungle Book!

Look for the bare necessities

The simple bare necessities

Forget about your worries and your strife!

Only, the "bare necessities" is a very broad concept, as vast as nature itself, and the recipe isn't quite as simple as it seems when a friendly bear sings it to you. Lily's bare necessities are dangerously strict, and finding the middle ground between fanaticism and ignorance isn't easy. The rehearsal process for our show started in February and wrapped up in June (if a dress rehearsal without an audience can be considered a wrap), with a break between March and May due to the pandemic. So, thoughts about the show, Lily's ideology, what the bare necessities truly mean, the other species that barely coexist with us, and ecologists' warnings about global warming all collided with theories about the new virus. Covid-19 – When the Earth Strikes Back is the title of one article that suggests the virus originated as a sort of revenge by the planet for all the wrongs committed by humanity over the centuries. So many photos emerged from all over the world of animal species returning to their former habitats that "With people in lockdown, wildlife returns to..." became a popular meme format. There were sensible voices arguing that we should reconsider our consumerist lifestyles because, indeed, for two months we managed without international flights, without factories running at full steam, and generally, with much less – with the bare necessities.

It's very hard for me to position myself between those who deny global warming altogether or those who say the planet is going to end anyway so why restrict ourselves, and on the other side, the deep ecologists who campaign against having children. What I do know is that if the well-being of the planet were our top priority, we would stop doing many things we now consider indispensable. And we would certainly stop making theatre! We would have no reason to waste funds, materials, electricity, and human energy to create fictional worlds while the real world is crumbling. Theatre is not a basic survival necessity; its resources could be used much more practically, just as the musicians on the Titanic could have done something more useful while the ship was sinking—but wouldn't that have been a shame?

Fun-creepy fact: Lily, the nickname Diana Dragoș gave the character of the Woman, has a very ancient origin. Lilith, in fact, appears in a medieval Jewish text as Adam's first wife. Lilith is also mentioned in legends as a demonic figure associated with infanticide. In the Bible, she appears a few times as the screech owl of the night. But the strangest thing is that one of the earliest historical references to Lilith's existence dates back to 2400 BC, on a list of Sumerian demons, where a frightening contingent of "Lillu demons" is described with succubus-like traits, known for "visiting sleeping men in their dreams to seduce them and thus produce grotesque children." [1]

[1] https://www.vice.com/ro/article/599q3z/demonul-alungat-din-rai-pentru-ca-a-refuzat-pozitia-misionarului

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