“…The Octopus questions several phenomena of Generation Z, trying to highlight the responsibility of adults. This makes the narrative branching (hence the title) and integrates secondary storylines: the story of David’s girlfriend, a girl from a precarious single-parent family, who becomes pregnant; the story of David’s father’s family, with his second wife and their child; the story of the bullied schoolmate, etc.” (Oana Stoica, Neighborhood Theater- Generation Z and toxic parentsi)

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❝…The Octopus neither excuses nor accuses. Instead, it fleshes out the spoiled children with suicidal tendencies, the teenage relationships ending in abortion, the psychiatric prescriptions that temporarily dull the absence of a parent, the much younger girlfriends, or the mothers for whom children and business are equivalent (“If you take your eyes off them, you lose them”). From a childhood where police are bribed to the threshold of the baccalaureate, which is paramount in the father’s interests, favoring an already evident addiction (“Do what you want, but pass the baccalaureate for me”), the show proposes, on a descending slope of subtlety, a fall into excess seen entirely from the subjective angle of David (Dragoș Stoica), the problem child.❞ (Adda Mihăescu, „The Octopus” or the trauma bond generation)

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“„The Octopus”, a production with which Catinca Drăgănescu marks a new territory in Masca Theater, where she has been at the helm for a few months, is a show whose text and direction she signs, it is a powerful show, about the contemporary family, almost always dysfunctional, about the dangers of adolescence, about love and lack of love, about modern parenting, education, and the mistakes of a new generation that does not know how to manage life, meaning, money, freedom…„The Octopus” is, for sure, the kind of show that any teenager would enjoy, because they will recognize there larger or smaller fragments of their own reality. (Monica Andronescu, Five shows for the young audience)

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“…In The Octopus, we see the “rule,” not the exception, the common situation, not the exceptional and singular one. Catinca Drăgănescu will also get to where modernist theater takes us, to a symbolic generalization, but here it is no longer about the general-human, but about the social and societal-human. And the theater is no longer aesthetic and aestheticizing, with a right-wing ideology separated by the author from his “apolitical” and “artistic” show, but one openly involved in the drama unfolding on stage, with a left-wing ideology through which the director questions today’s society and what is happening, with all of us, in it. Without having ideological inflections – possible communist or anti-communist tirades as written in the book -, the show at Teatrul Masca is one of the most profoundly social and political Romanian shows I have seen lately. (Daniel Cristea-Enache, Characters, Actors, Masks – The Octopus)

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