The Dead And The Living

by Ștefan Caraman, directed by Ana Mărgineanu

Opening night: November 8, 2002

The performance is meant to be a radiography of life in a place where it can be found next to death, that is in a morgue. An ordinary day at the morgue is defined by chopping bodies among jokes and lunchbreaks and shocks someone who is not used with this atmosphere. It’s a world where death is no longer misterious, life is no longer poetical and human beings become merely objects. A single character doesn’t sink into this world, though he lives in it. Young assistant Maler avoids the vulgar company of the living, preferring to take refuge in an imaginary world, next to the dead.
He replaces reality with an universe of joy and of music, that would be perfect if it were not inhabited by the dead. In real life, Maler is not praised, is humiliated. In his world, he becomes a god, the star to whom the dead dedicate their dance.
In reality, every new day is only a repetition of the previous one. Nothing changes, nothing differentiates the days one from another. But the incoming body of a young girl breaks this routine. Her beauty reveals long forgotten gestures and feelings. When the assistants want to disect her, Maler defends the dead girl’s body with his life. The assistants, who have been considering Maler an intruder for a long time, beat him. Afterwards, they are contaminated by a strange exhaustion.
Left alone, Maler stages his wedding, also as a musical. In his imagination, the bride comes to life and the nuptial ceremony is a strange mixture of opulence and grizzliness. But the young girl isn’t really dead, and she comes to her senses during the sexual act. It’s the moment when Maler’s dream becomes real. But the reality turns into a nightmare soon after this. The girl is far from being a “Sleeping Beauty”. Instead of being grateful to Maler for having saved her life, she accuses him of having raped her, while being dead. The bride refuses life, any relation between the two of them becomes impossible, and the wonderful and the miraculous dimension of Maler’s dream becomes a nightmare in reality. Transformed by Cameea into a beast, Maler kills her ferociously. Giving up his dream, Maler becomes a common butcher among others like him, who are dead before even getting born.