TEATRO LÚCIDO AT THE EDGE OF INFINITY

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Script by Radu Afrim, including texts by Adriana Bittel, Bogdan Răileanu, Doina Ruști

When Radu Afrim plays, you want to be there—to see what emerges: an afrimiad or an afrimedia, a suspenseful oscillation between absurd situations, bizarrely comic lines, and poetry that brings you to tears.

Afrim almost invents a new dramatic genre, relying on the element of surprise that bursts from every direction—text, acting, set design, props, costumes, and music.

"Sometimes, a little bit of kitsch holds you back if you feel like you've surged too far ahead of your peers in aspirations and ideals."—this line from Afrim’s script might serve as one of the keys to understanding the playful (self-)irony that fuels this production. With a painful sense of humor, Afrim lucidly—just as he has accustomed his audience throughout his theatrical work—takes aim at all the intolerances of our times.

Cast

• Theodor Șoptelea
• Andrei Bibire
• Liliana Cazan
• Ștefan Mihai
• Cristiana Luca
• Lana Moscaliuc
• Cătălin Bucur
• Anaïs Agi-Ali
• Ecaterina Lupu
• Iulian Enache
• Dana Dumitrescu
• Costinel Antone
• Nina Udrescu
• Cosmin Conțolencu

Reviews

The Cosmos, Covid, the Art Museum of Constanța, the 125 steps, Ana Aslan, the interwar sea and today’s sea, the neighbor with the hypnotic breasts from the second floor, the woman who is a mermaid in her spare time, the lifeguard cemented in melancholy, the pansies of the city’s main roundabout, the “style figurines,” the lady Stanley Kubrick fell in love with and from whom he wanted to rent the building to film his Space Odyssey, Antonel from Teleorman (Costinel Antone) and his aunt about whom we will never learn any details, Dostoevsky’s Idiot in the trunk of the white Mercedes, Mr. Ginel from green spaces (Iulian Enache), Mrs. Mioara’s (failed) sexual act, the walruses throwing themselves off cliffs because of melting ice shelves, and a few hundred other actional and ideational “events” of the show lead you into a tender sense of overwhelming, methodologically kept in check by a director more generous than ever in making directing the soil for acting performances. [...] The troupe from Constanța never ceases to amaze: magnetic, intense, and charismatic actresses and actors, in direct communication with the audience, ready to dive into profound monologues, but also into relationships so real, juggling punchlines while melting into choreographic phrasings fused with poetry, with voices that know how to give texture to lines and professionally approach complex melodic lines. Acting-joy...

Călin Ciobotari - 7Iași.ro

https://www.7iasi.ro/cu-afrim-la-malul-infinitului/

The troupe of the Constanța State Theatre sustained the intensity of the performance with remarkable professionalism. A demanding, complex show, with shifts between comedy and drama and unpredictable plot twists - each fully embraced by the actors. The 3 hours and 40 minutes of the show pass by unnoticed: Theodor Șoptelea and Andrei Bibire skillfully portray the gay Moldovan facilitators of a narrative exploration workshop through performance. The classic “theatre within theatre” frame allows for a succession of performances in which the actors’ bodies take on a triple function: first, as a medium for narrative expression; second, as a metatheatrical instrument, reflecting on the performative act and its purpose; and third, as the principal aesthetic element, embodying the experience in order to transmit it to the viewer. Without a single false note and in complete synergy, Șoptelea and Bibire keep a fast but believable pace, blending humor with a precise awareness of how far identity clichés can be pushed without crossing the fragile line between irony and offense. Cristiana Luca and Ștefan Mihai, alongside the other dysfunctional couple played by Cătălin Bucur and Anais Agi-Ali, “tell stories” with their bodies in a dialogue that is at times tense, at times tender, but always emotionally resonant. Their performances cast a spell over the audience, creating expectations that, when subverted, spark wonder, laughter, or even a collective breath that marks the long-awaited conclusion. The individual stories or monologues supported by episodic dialogue partners are convincing - whether they unfold as projections of characters extending the spectators’ still-unknown desires. Lana Moscaliuc interprets soul-wrenching lyricism with both elegance and power; Liliana Cazan embodies the seductive mermaid, deconstructing the erotic feminine cliché embedded in male fantasies, in the stairwell triangles of Dostoevsky’s Variable by Bogdan Răileanu; Costinel Antone transforms effortlessly into an innocent with a literal understanding of the world; Dana Dumitrescu recreates step by step a visit to a man’s house during his wife’s absence, based on the short story by Adriana Bittel, traversing the full spectrum of contradictory emotions before arriving at the moral decision to reign them in, following the principle: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Alongside these true recitals of mastery, Ecaterina Lupu crafts a dialogue between the age of vulnerable childhood and the youth that lacks awareness of the abuse being relived in an attempt to heal it - drawn from the prose of Doina Ruști. The actress auto-ventriloquizes with the virtuosity of a violinist playing her own vocal strings. Finally, Nina Udrescu plays a venerable con artist, credible right up until the moment she is exposed. From one episode to the next, the audience exhales again and again, relieved, because the actors’ performances excel equally at creating dramatic illusion and at breaking it - in Broadway-worthy rhythms during group dances and pair sequences choreographed by Flavia Giurgiu.

Ileana Marin - fictiunea.ro

https://fictiunea.ro/2025/205/art28/index.html

If you want to see a troupe of actors in all their vitality, in a dense comedy that plays with variations - exploring all those transitional and fluid zones between poetry and farce, between soap opera and drama - it’s worth making the trip to the seaside. This is the kind of performance with such rich textuality and, therefore, such a demanding stage dynamic that only energy and talent can pull it off - and they do. The dramatic premise, well chosen for the broad range of registers it later embraces, goes like this: a gay Moldovan couple is hosting a group workshop by the sea, where participants are asked to "gather" local stories or to confess their own, using “performative languages.” It’s from the very beginning a comic and dramaturgically potent statement on the quest-sale-of-nothing-with-pretensions that many (quote-unquote) artists seem to be increasingly haunted by these days. [...] I began this text by praising the talent of the Constanța State Theatre actors and their eagerness to perform, and I’d like to dedicate a few final sentences to some of them. Teatro Lúcido at the Edge of Infinity is a show with an extraordinary Theodor Șoptelea - fully believable in broad comedy, with an instinct for timing and an understanding of how things should look and feel on stage, constantly elevating the scene’s energy. Ecaterina Lupu brings clarity and sharpness, a contained performance that’s cinematic in quality, thinking through every word she says. Her solo moment - in motion, delivering a monologue as a little girl - could easily serve as a model for that fine, precious line between theatre and performance art. Cristiana Luca strikes me as an outstanding character actress: generous, deeply attuned to relationships and their nuances, knowing exactly when to captivate and when to “hold back.” Most of all, she manages to transmit that sophisticated Afrim-style comedy - where laughter always carries multiple meanings. Ștefan Mihai makes much out of little: his face is in constant flux, he gives the impression of fantastic lightness on stage, and he builds, almost entirely through suggestion, the portrait of a semi-failed, dreamer-like young man - someone you could swear you’ve met in real life, a kind of waiter-slash-lounge singer from a terrace twenty years ago… In fact, once again, all of Afrim’s actors and characters continue to linger with you, long after the show is over.

Mihai Ivașcu - mezanin.ro

https://www.mezanin.ro/trupa-lucida-de-la-malul-infinitului/

The nostalgia of a lost paradise and its remnants scattered through the modern world, the perpetual anxiety of human relationships, the hysteria of chasing a vanished sense of peace, the yearning for contemplative time, the typological and situational comedy of human frenzy in action - in short, the tragicomedy of our lives, laid bare against the backdrop of a cosmos that “couldn’t care less” - are all woven together into a living fresco in Teatro Lúcido at the Edge of Infinity. [...] The characters are strange, excessive, and exalted. Each one’s dilemmas are resolved in self-referential bubbles; the characters wear their fate like a reflective monologue or engage in partnerships guaranteed to deceive, where betrayal is the key to the relationship. Destiny hovers over them all. That’s the overwhelming sensation you get while watching Teatro Lúcido. It feels like a dress rehearsal. But it is, in fact, a story about the fiction of life. Irregular, unexpected, at times bland, at others unbearably funny, and occasionally too intense… [...] Afrim’s textual poetics, this time around, is one of deconstruction - of breaking the story into fragments and coexisting levels that create an asymmetric, layered tension. There’s reciting, dancing, singing, declaiming, monologuing and dialoguing all at once. I’d call it a dreamlike way of storytelling - there is no dramatic climax in the traditional sense; there is only unfolding, experience, a journey. That’s why the imprint left by the show lingers for days afterward, with images resurfacing from the performance, even though in the moment, in the theatre, you may have occasionally felt the length of it. But that length was the state itself - the obligation to remain, for a time, immersed in that state. The texts by Adriana Bittel, Doina Ruști, and Bogdan Răileanu are intertwined with a script written by Radu Afrim - like lianas coiling around and directing the actors. It’s a true “cooking pot chaos” scenario, to borrow the phrase from an actor in The White Lotus. The Constanța State Theatre troupe is fabulous. It’s a company that can spark inspiration in a director the same way it does in its audience. With the same admiring joy I felt in Andrei Șerban’s Twelfth Night, I rediscover here Cristiana Luca and Ștefan Mihai, Cătălin Bucur and Ecaterina Lupu, Andrei Bibire and Theodor Șoptelea (what an extraordinary marathon in Teatro Lúcido), Costinel Antone and Iulian Enache, and I discover Lana Moscaliuc, Dana Dumitrescu, Nina Udrescu, and the captivating debut of Anais Agi-Ali. This show, more than most, seems to demand that all the actors throw themselves into the void without a safety net - trusting that wings will grow. And they do.

Corina Șuteu - Revista 22

https://revista22.ro/cultura/afrim-la-malul-infinitului

The machine-gunning of stereotypical visions of reality is achieved through the humor with which clichés are deconstructed and reconfigured. The director constantly plays with the lyrical-comic conjunction, integrating fragments of toxic reality into the inner universe of the characters, among their fears and anxieties that erupt verbally, visually, auditorily (the soundscape, as always in Afrim's work, is nearly ever-present), or through movement (choreography by Flavia Giurgiu). Language is an important element—not only the colloquialism mingled with lyrical passages displayed by the characters, but also the Moldavian dialect of the gay couple (whose traditional Romanian names have been sublimated into the self-ironic duo “Massimo and Dutti”) and the inventive deformation of words (another Afrim trademark), as in the phrase “stylistic figurine.” In Afrim’s work, the boundary between the objective and subjective space, between affect and imagination, between the material and inner world, is never rigidly drawn. On the contrary, fragments from one universe populate the other, in a narrative that is sometimes purely visual, yet fluent. The microcosm on stage often spills beyond it, especially through the director’s photographs, which draw the characters into realistic landscapes he frames in his own melancholic, painterly style. In this case, as the audience arrives at the theatre, a mermaid reads Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (the book appears in the performance, of course) in the foyer of the Studio Hall, as a prelude to the surreal collage that will unfold. The Constanța troupe is lively, eager to play, and extremely versatile in tackling various dramatic genres, as well as in dancing and singing, with strong stage presences such as Lana Moscaliuc, Ecaterina Lupu, or the couples Andrei Bibire – Theodor Șoptelea (the latter delivering a remarkable comedic performance built partly around language), whose dynamic is one of similarity, and Cristiana Luca – Ștefan Mihai, whose pairing is dissonant. It’s an admirable team effort for a demanding and lengthy production (nearly four hours, with an intermission). Despite the humor, oblique, irreverent, and often biting, as is Afrim’s signature, the performance carries a nostalgic air, a hint of mourning for a world (not just the seaside) on the brink of disappearing. “A warship on the horizon,” a line repeated throughout the show, sends chills, and our laughter slowly twists into a grimace.

Oana Stoica - Scena9

https://www.scena9.ro/article/teatru-constanta-afrim-la-malul-marii-teatro-lucido-la-malul-infinitului

Radu Afrim. He hates bad Russians and loves good theatre. When he wants to play nicely, he runs to Constanța. There, he has a troupe of sprightly young actors, excellently trained, with whom he can run across any beach and swim calmly through any kind of theatrical waves. These waves rise from the depths of contemporary Romanian prose, tossed ashore by a notable literary current that scattered their pages through the sand. They are discovered, seemingly by accident, together with the Constanța troupe he’s brought out again for a new photo session because the light is just right — texts gathered seemingly at random, read and interpreted in spontaneous choreography by Flavia Giurgiu, who’s just come back from a run. Together, they joyfully uncover all sorts of new meanings, which Afrim then weaves tightly — as only he can — into the net of a narrative cast out to catch dramatic fish between seasons, after having securely fastened to it all the concerns that colorfully haunt his summer creative spree with memories from every age of vitality. And to which he secretly returns off-season, curious to see what’s gotten caught in the youth-net of his past. Carefully fishing out the banal caught in the net cast out to sea (excellent choice to rescue us from between the warships with the help of the lifeguard — the charming Cătălin Bucur, excellently showcased, who will evolve astonishingly over the course of the three-hour show — the kind who saves souls thrashing in the waves, not lost sex bots (!)), who has just hooked up with the Tatar girl Güzel Kâz (meaning “beautiful girl” — very sexy Anaïs Agi-Ali, an actress who can draw punchlines with her feet), and together they lay on the table of eroticism the last crumbs of sex between real men and women (before all worldly pleasures are indexed, with a click, in the great virtual catalog of love). With abundant humor, they ironically portray the landscape of today’s relationships — hosted for over three hours in the luxury location where Dutti and Massimo organize a choreography workshop. Into this setting will crash all sorts of emotionally frayed individuals, dissecting relationships across all ages and colors: Michi (as always, a delight — the super-talented Ștefan Mihai), a Florin Piersic look-alike (especially in spirit!), who dallied with deck-chair lounging until he finally followed his passion and opened a walnut-cake bakery by the ocean; his partner Ina, the eco-conscious accountant (fresh as usual, Cristiana Luca), who organizes his life while screwing his brains out against all the walls (and he likes it, he likes it, likes it — hands up! join in too, let’s complete the five-year plan in four and a half, with as many people, in as many places, and as many positions as possible!!!). Sabina Rusu — the exceptional Ecaterina Lupu — a waitress in a multinational who would like to use other hemispheres of her brain too, passionate about purple pansies with soft yellow (!), and consequently the bearer of the most impressive “Tits” in Romanian Erotic Stories, as masterfully described by Doina Ruști (and provocatively lifted in a savage carnal dance by Flavia Giurgiu) at the moment of first touch (Iulian Enache, Ginel from public works, later turned cop); Anelise (the bombshell Liliana Cazan), fan of Prince Myshkin, mermaid in her spare time, woman when busy, caught in the foyer, rescued from shore by speleologists and scrubbed of her scales, passed through the lifeguard’s bed before stuffing her breasts into a robe with imperial lilies, only to be assigned to the second floor of the building in Bogdan Răileanu’s original story, lighting the fiery dreams of her neighbors and the jealousy of their envious wives. Lana del Mar (always like a painting — Lana Moscaliuc), the most mature woman in the group (who, besides putting the brakes on the faucet of platitudes, stupidities, and clichés of the younger generation, becomes a reliable accomplice in Afrim’s mature poetry in a few exceptional scenes that you’ll surely clip and keep for a long time in a corner of your soul); Mioara (Dana Dumitrescu), the voice of bitter wisdom at an age where no kind of ripening is still on the table, come to mend the sadness in a story of two reasonable people long past their prime, as told by Adriana Bittel; and last but not least, Antonel from Teleorman (Costinel Antone), a spark for a few fireworks, brought into the pristine world of top dreamers as (an excellent!) trigger for jealousy. Before Mrs. N (an excellent surprise — Nina Udrescu, in top form!), always present (!), is reinstated and takes back her role as hostess in the 100% Afrim-style policier tapestry, whose protagonists — the delightful Dutti and Massimo aka Ducu and Maxim, played by Theodor Șoptelea (the undisputed Moldovan host of this comedic madness) and Andrei Bibire (his narcissistic, dominant, otherwise sensual and charming partner, self-appointed leader) — finally show their true colors. After dazzling us with the many shades of their performance mastery in a fascinating gay couple rife with power struggles, these two actors, in full bloom, ignite a chain reaction throughout the Constanța troupe — each contributing their own energy (Radu Afrim once again arming everyone with generous roles that showcase them beautifully, while choreographer Flavia Giurgiu vigorously shakes up their carnal and physical sides — it'll be hard to choose a favorite for any nomination (!)).

Luciana Antofi

https://lucianantofi.wordpress.com/2025/04/17/ce-nu-te-omoara-te-afrimeste-teatro-lucido-la-malul-infinitului-lui-radu-afrim-la-constanta/