Get ready for some theatrical magic! The 9th edition of Drama 5 brings us the exciting November premiere of "Armageddon Rebranded," based on the wonderful script written by playwright Alex Gorghe during our residency and selected to be staged this autumn.

To find out more about this fresh and thrilling production, we invited its brilliant director, Irisz Kovacs, to share a few joyful thoughts before the big premiere!

I am currently working on "Armageddon Rebranded" by Alex Gorghe, and our exciting goal is to theatrically explore that feeling of information overload—where you are faced with so much content that you are unable to process it all, which is pretty much the status quo of a life lived online! So, on an artistic note, I am playfully researching just how many silly jokes per minute of the show we can pack in without annoying our wonderful audience. 🙂

Alex’s script is wonderfully challenging because it beautifully balances a very serious side, tackling themes like the radicalization of the very young, self-harm, incel culture, and more, with a delightfully trivial or burlesque comic zone. You will see Spongebob and Dan Spătaru pop up, alongside homoerotic dialogues between Romanian literary icons Creangă and Eminescu! The tone is constantly broken and flipped, just like when you are happily scrolling through TikTok and the most unexpected things are placed side by side. When shaping a show like this, trust between us, the creators, and you, the theatergoers, is absolutely vital. I want our audience to be wonderfully amazed by what happens on stage, but never betrayed. For the heavier scenes, we have trigger warnings, though placing them sometimes makes you feel like you are exaggerating when you think of the lighter, comic moments. But that’s the beautiful shift in perspective as a director working with such themes: paying extra attention to the impact our work with fiction can have on the real people who come to experience it.

For instance, our play also presents a teenager's relationship with artificial intelligence. Just recently, a mother in Florida sued Character.AI because her 14-year-old son tragically took his own life following a relationship with a bot designed to resemble Daenerys from Game of Thrones. When the boy wrote that he did not want to die in a painful way, the bot replied that this was no reason not to "do it." This is why I take our approach to the play's themes incredibly seriously, fully aware that theater can never fully encompass such real-world tragedies.

For "Armageddon Rebranded," I really wanted to focus on rhythm and pacing within a non-linear text, exploring how to give it a beautiful coherence (even though it is wonderfully explosive!) and embroidery-like surprises for the audience in a space they are used to taking for granted. I am absolutely fascinated by the shows directed by Attila Vidnyánszky Jr., for example—they are incredibly rich without relying on inaccessible technical means, shining purely through creativity and stage intelligence! While we didn’t necessarily copy that, it served as a wonderful example of a virtuosic technique I tried to apply: lots of entrances, lots of exits, plenty of moments born out of pure improvisation, and a massive dedication to a single gag that might only win us a gentle smile.

Both the script and the performance set out with the ambitious goal of keeping our audience thoroughly entertained and engaged, and I truly hope we succeed! I also hope it gives people a warm opportunity to reflect, even for just a minute, on their relationship with the internet, artificial intelligence, and loneliness. Our characters are very young and already quite tired of the world they live in, a feeling I believe many of us can relate to in one way or another.

It’s a beautifully bicolor show! Visually speaking, that is what’s exciting me right now: a chromatic convention of the space and the living beings within it. This is the fabulous result of collaborating with set designer Răzvan Bordoș, who has been an absolute force of nature in creating this show (even as I write these lines, he is busy crafting props!). Our core idea was very simple, which made finding creative ways to bring it to life on stage a thrilling challenge. The text was already quite polished when we got it, so we didn't make many changes, but along the way, we added a monologue that I think is absolutely brilliant. Thanks, Alex! The music by Mara Solomon is also super, perfectly boosting, accentuating, and poking fun at the action.

But the most wonderful collaborators were, of course, the actors! We kicked off rehearsals with a workshop period, and it was an absolute joy to discover how generous and incredibly well-trained they are. They are all doing a marvelous job in a show packed with fast and challenging transitions! This was the greatest reward of the entire process—the fact that a huge part of what you will see on stage was born from a warm, collaborative process where the actors were true co-creators.

The show "Armageddon Rebranded" is part of the Drama 5 project, 9th Edition.

A cultural project co-funded by the National Cultural Fund Administration. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the National Cultural Fund Administration. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the program or how the project results may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding beneficiary.

A cultural project proudly funded by the Ministry of Culture, the City Hall and Local Council of Cluj-Napoca, and the Cluj County Council.

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