Our Project
We present you the Write About You Festival, the first theater festival in Romania that showcases plays written by people with no experience in drama, based exclusively on their life stories. It is a part of the Write About You platform, which has been documenting stories from present-day Romania since 2010, together with over 100 participants of all ages. It has created 5 complete new plays that will premiere in the festival, while dozens of other texts are still in production, with topics ranging from adolescence to weight struggles, lost love to job dissatisfaction and from sex chat rooms to abortion. The Festival is held under the patronage of the Embassy of Ireland, and is opened with the show "Solpadeine is my boyfriend", written and performed by Stefanie Preissner, directed by Gina Moxley and produced by Kate Ferris. The show will be performed on the 10th and 11th of May at Teatrul Act
How did we get here?
The Write About You platform was founded in 2010 by Vera Ion and Sorin Poama, a director and actor who found themselves out of place in Bucharest after finishing college, with no theater to hire them. So they wrote a successful play based on their struggles as young artists, called Ich Clown, and as more and more people became interested in sharing a similar story, they decided to start an Alternative Theater Workshop that has generated nothing short of a cultural Romanian movement. Write About You was born and since then, people of all kinds have contributed to an ever growing archive of 500 genuine texts depicting scenes and narratives based on simple yet powerful life stories documenting characters, connections, backgrounds, behavioral types, sub-cultures, language, attitudes and themes related to the present that build a fascinating puzzle of stories about the world we live in.
WAY in numbers
60 playwrights, 1000 people actively interested in the project, 7 workshops a week, 8 theater plays based on authentic Romanian texts, 10 new plays as works in progress, 2 trainers, 30 contributing artists.
What will you see?
WAY will open its gates on the 10th of May 2013 and work its magic until the 10th of June the same year.
The structure of the festival is comprised of performance theater, readers theater, theater workshops, short film projections and an experimental team of writers and performers that will document the festival and produce multi media content based on it.
The plays in short
Processed cheese by Corina Ciubotaru is about Eliza’s dream: to do advertising that makes people happy. But as she begins working in her first agency, she discovers a world based on different rules than she had expected.
In The last heroes by Anca Stefan, Maia is 25 and loves to jump from the boring present, with a steady relationship and predictable days, straight into her glorious past of parties, flirting and high-school magic. When her current relationship starts to fizzle, she decides to find Tudor, the high-school sweetheart she had always been in love with.
In the kitchen and at the seaside by Cosmin Briciu depicts the dynamic of a long-term couple and the changes that arise during a 15 year old relationship between two people that are in love but mysteriously begin hurting each other
Live by my will, die by my hand by Andreea Lupu illustrates the power relationships within a family and the deepening conflict between generations.
Stand up pls by Silviana Visan Carter speaks about the the projection of women in society and the struggles of a small town girl that moves to the big city to study theater where she finds that engaging in vidochats is the only way she can raise money to support her studies.
