Saviana Stănescu: TOYS: A Dark Fairy Tale

Being a foreigner, an immigrant or a refugee is not an uncommon, still not a too easy situation, even in a welcoming country or environment. Finding a new identity without giving up your own spiritual values is a delicate balance, which is particularly tough to maintain when you deliberately choose the way of forgetting. But the more  you try to get rid of your own past, your own roots and traditions, the more the memories of the past - good or bad, dear or embarrassing - will haunt you.
Saviana Stanescu deals with that feeling in her play TOYS, putting the two sister-characters to face each other in a mirror, which makes them almost like the negatives of each other, or even the two sides of the same, unique character.
In our approach Madonna/Shari is a kind of alter-ego of Clara/Fatma, a young woman immigrated to America from a South-Eastern-European country, where religious extremism endangers the rights and life of women. Clara does all her best to escape the torturing memories. But the harder she denies her true identity and real story, the more the image of the past returns taking on the shape of a nightmare which becomes her obsession. She has to make that journey all the way back to herself to face her past and reconcile it with her present in order to be able to turn her look into the future.