ABSTRACT. The educational process is extremely stressful for the student, at a psychological as well as a physiological level. In order to achieve a functional balance between the pupils’ well-being and the efficiency of the learning process, the school curriculum has to match pupils’ potential, with teachers acting as supervisors of the whole array of activities which can pose a threat for exceeding certain stress values. Focusing on the pupil as well as on learning, school has to become an environment where stress is maintained at a level where it provides incentive to learning, without disrupting it. Theatre has always been a means of displaying societal flaws and criticizing behaviours. Placed under a theatrical microscope, school begins to look as fragmented as the individuals themselves, with shifting identities, biased attitudes and dislocated meanings. When the audience is included in the dynamics of the play, the staged reality becomes a shared one, and the classical mechanisms of mediation are dissolved and reconstructed. Symbols and metaphors challenge the borders between objective reality and on-stage simulation, while the narrative of the play is turning into a subversive representation of life-on-TV, and stress stops being a fault and starts becoming a necessary condition.

Keywords: stress; school; postmodern theatre; Dreaming Romania; media culture