The author’s last essays, ‘The magician’, a comic fantasy that tends to tragedy
rainy Wednesday in Usera. In the living room almond groves 41, the former bingo which now serves as rehearsal for the Centro Dramático Nacional, Juan Mayorga is raising The magician, his latest and challenging libretto. Is immersed in the test number 24, right in the middle of this process, which will culminate with the premiere of the piece starring Clara Sanchís and José Luis García Pérez, in the Valle-Inclán Theater on November 23. The idea for this mount came from a personal anecdote. “Once, at a congress of magic I declared not suitable for an exercise of hypnotism”. What served as a trigger poetic of a story in which a woman returns to her home after one of these shows. However, what is it that has returned or is still hypnotized on stage? And from there starts a comedy fantastic (in its two senses) that becomes a family drama and even terror tale. A mixture of genres that hides many levels of reading: a reflection on the theatre itself, a devastating x-ray of the wear in a pair, the tension between desire and reality… Because while many authors practice the theatre of the thesis, the works of Mayorga always imply a crossroads.
“There is a religious drama, the sermon, to which some come as if it were your own parish to tell him how to think and how to feel. It is something that I’m not interested in anything as the creator or as a spectator,” he explains. “I think that the theatre has to be a poetic experience, which has an extraordinary strength to suspend the viewer in front of good questions. In response to a question that divided the stalls, and even each viewer”. In that sense, Mayorga is confident in the scene as a vehicle to show the maze in which many times we move. “Art, in general, and theatre in particular, must be able to represent the complex as a complex. In front of the simplifications that surround us, the theatre must have capacity for the deployment, for the hue, to call our attention to aspects that we passed unnoticed, and that, rather than making things more simple, we make it more difficult to think and even to feel.”
Mayorga is watching while their players make a pass of the function. Can’t be more happy with them, although it draws a smile every time he speaks, María Galiana with your wisdom of comic old. At all times, he speaks with softness. Continues to maintain their ways of professor of the institute, even though it is the playwright’s most widely read and translated of our scene.
While it rehearses The magician, his monologue Intensely blue is on tour in Spain. This work, which was first a graphic novel with drawings by Daniel Montero Galán (“did a wonderful job”), you see at the Arriaga Theater of Bilbao on Tuesday 6 and Wednesday 7 November. César Sarachu, which are already addressed in Reykjavik, is the subject of the function. Mayorga, director still in the early stages, had also worked with García-Pérez and Sanchis. Continue to your hand is not casual. “Somehow it is in me the intention of forming a company.”
SERGIO ENRIQUEZ-NISTAL
Intensely blue shows the story of a man who embarks on a fantastic journey through the leave the house with their swimming goggles. Something that, again, happened to own Mayorga. As in The magician, there is also a tension between reality and desire. The author identifies this as one of the pillars of its dramaturgy. “There is something of this in The boy in the last row, in love Letters to Stalin or in The garden burned. This tension between what is factual, what is real and what one wishes or constructed through the imagination is in many of my works and, above all, in Cervantes. We can read don Quixote as the story of a man who, tired of her small world manchego, through the words you have learned in the novels of chivalry, he builds and lives in an alternate world. There is a belief in the transformative power of words, in that whatever our world words can transfigurarlo”.
Both mounts serve to cement the Mayorga director, a facet that enters into tension with the playwright that is. Sometimes, the Mayorga director wants to cross out a sentence that the Mayorga author is reluctant to touch. “In my work I try to avoid a redundancy between the author and the director. The playwright is omnipotent because the paper can bear everything, but the principal is very little powerful because the scenario does not hold almost anything. The director has to work with limits while the author must not accept them, but locking oneself, become crazy and then you share your madness with others. In contrast, the work of the director is to take advantage of each edge to turn it into an occasion poetic, that is what make great teachers.”.
About the differences and similarities between the author and director, Mayorga explains the following: “somehow, I think that both the playwright as the director of the scene, both are writers. It happens that the author is the representative of the reader, suggests a few signs that a reader should be able to decipher and interpret. While the director is a representative of the viewer. It also proposes a set of signs, but not only verbal, as the tone in which things are said, or the fact that two people speak more or less estranged. Each one builds texts, one on paper and another in space and in time. But, from there, begin the differences. The author works in solitude while the director writes with the other. All the errors that exist in The mage will be mine, but many of the findings were thanks to my actors and partners”.
For your own Mayorga, his texts contain secrets that he often does not know they are there. This is why you don’t like to consider their productions as “definitive” and enjoys every time someone edits her texts. “In addition, I have had a lot of luck. Great directors have worked with my texts”. What motivates you to lead is also to do with the mystery. “The texts that I have chosen to take them to the scene, they were texts which she believed offered a resistance to the direction. It was works with which he came to the rehearsal room with more uncertainties than certainties”.
And that is, in the end, the essence of the theatre are always questions and uncertainties. As he wrote Lorca, “only the mystery keeps us alive”.
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