Ten works necessary to understand the history of theater

The theater’s vitality allows reinterpreting tragic or comical storylines from every period, in a puzzling world full of fantasy that culminates in catharsis and establishes a tight bond with the audience, century after century.

Confession or Tinder of Sin

JOSEP PALAU I FABRE, 2000

Palau i Fabre, a firm follower of Picasso, is one of my three. Confession or tinder of sin is his most poetic and yet obscene work. One of his most recurrent themes was sexual incitement. One day I asked him what he would want to become if he were human, to what he responded: “A bull”. I dramatize his warning of the possible jealousy between the audience and the show. Place: a church with a confessional and a communion table. Actors, completely naked.

Interior

MAURICE MAETERLINCK, 1894

Maeterlinck, a symbolist, studied the world of bees, butterflies, and other insects. Interior is his most ambitious work and the least performed; however, along with Intruder, it was on stage by modernists at Sitges’ Cau Ferrat in the late 1800s. The play reminisces the placid table talk through a window. People from town come by to give news of their old daughter’s suicide. The night goes on and they do not find a way to tell to the family, who are happy and appeased. The night draws on dreadfully, and quietness becomes tense and eternal.

Sunday

JOAN BROSSA, 1964

A theater play with a first act, prologue and epilogue, and a comedy with 3 characters. White living room with a trio and walls. The flying systems do and undo the stage. Brossa created Dau al Set. He deemed his creations as “dramatic poetry”: re-living styles and characters from traditional theater, from a new language to wonderland and a dragon throat that turns the plot and the words into a pictorial script.

Poet in New York

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA, 1929-1930

García Lorca, author of the Romancero gitano [Gypsy Romance] and Bodas de sangre [Blood Wedding], dramatically concludes his past work to face his homosexuality in Poet in New York and redirects his attention towards negritude. New York fascinates him. “Niggers! Niggers! Niggers! Niggers! The blood has no doors in your night from the face upwards”. Poet in New York is not conceived as a theatre play but it is indeed theater. Theater from yesterday, today and tomorrow. It is a “landscape whose crowd vomits”. I believe it is vital to bring Poet in New York back in stage.

The Road to Damascus

AUGUST STRINDBERG, 1899

“We are expelled from Paradise”, says Strindberg and also says that “Ever since infancy we seeked God, but we only found evil”. This phrase inspired Bergman. He is a playwright playing between life and death. The main action of Road to Damascus focuses on a family and the couple’s anguish and conflicts that, as Ezra Pound claims, is the “species’ antenna”. Strindberg claims that art and neurosis justify our own schizophrenia and, thus, is an effective medicine for schizophrenia.

Oresteia

AESCHYLUS, 458 aC.

The only complete theatrical trilogy comes from Aeschylus, in the 5th century and, in the 21st century, it becomes the Oresteia. In it, families are described with some deification and mythology. It goes beyond time. Two brothers become enemies, a woman, Clytaemnestra, who awaits her husband’s return, Agamemnon. However, Agamemnon has an affair with Aegisthus. Agamemnon kills his own daughter. Clytaemnestra kills then her husband to preserve the adultery. Orestes, the son, decides to avenge his father’s death through Electra, his sister. A story filled with revenge that Aeschylus claims it to be an act of justice.

Bohemian lights

RAMÓN DEL VALLE-INCLÁN, 1920

Grotesque: this is the deformed reality by the convex mirror. A protagonist, Max Estrella, in an absurd, night-time, brilliant and hungry Madrid. 50 characters walk around these Bohemian lights. And among them, Max Estrella, Don Latino and Pica Lagartos saying that “the world is controversy”, while Don Latino confirms that “Spain is grotesque”. Blind people, tired and sad women, dusky atmosphere, dark and nocturnal, and deep in the monstrosity of this country so-called Spain.

Nausicaa

JOAN MARAGALL, 1908-1911

Nausicaa becomes obsessed by Ulysses, just like Maragall himself became obsessed with the legend, since she describes him as a godly figure who has descended straight from heaven. Nausicaa, the tragedy’s main character, becomes a lyrical and epic character. However, to Maragall theater’s art is an impure art despite, paradoxically, meeting Guimerà again as a model for a poet and lyrical and romantic dramatist. Nausicaa becomes an extravagant piece in the current theatre moment.

Julius Caesar

SHAKESPEARE, 1959

Julius Caesar is about the conspiracy against the Roman dictator, led by Marcus Brutus. The scene of Caesar’s death by the hand of Brutus is a record of humanity. Caesar plays the role of a tragic figure. His republican democracy collapses due to the ambition of the surrounding clans. Brutus, who commands the revolt, moves from treachery to esteem. On stage, Orson Welles’ protagonists were wearing Nazi and fascist uniforms. Julius Caesar represents a fight of powers that still enables to interpret our own fights in the 21st century.

It is as you please

LUIGI PIRANDELLO, 1917

Pirandello, a Nobel Prize of Literature, creates a popular, contradictory, fresh, and spontaneous society that is contextualized in Sicily and with a slight Neapolitan setting. It emphasizes life to theater and theater to life, with its distress and anxieties. His play creates a Mediterranean sensation, violent dark zones and happy moments. Lemon-tree perfume. The play enables the audience to enter the true Sicily, and also walk around the streets of Naples with balconies with hanging pictures of all kinds and husbands, grandparents or sons that have already died.