A playwright looking for curious audiences: this is Juan Mayorga

Mayorga took his eyes off the two hotel workers for a moment, replacing them with an old man leaning against one of the tables that made up this reconstructed Conquest archipelago. “It seems to be working,” he says. “Summer… what does it say?” she wonders. And then he explains: “I pay attention to things like this, and sometimes I catch something that I think is worthy of other people’s attention.“. And he adds: “The truth is that my program is very simple and at the same time very ambitious: to pay attention to the actions of people.” That’s it. To write theater is to know how to look at things in the world.

Deep down, Mayorga reveals himself only as a spectator: “‘The Burnt Garden’ is a work without a pretentious discourse on the Civil War. It seems to me that the audience leaves the theater with as many questions as the main character has, a character that starts with certainties and asks no less than the statue-man, that is, someone who will not answer. He. I think ‘The Burnt Garden’ contains an allegory of the theater itself because the main character comes in to confirm that he is right about something and comes out loaded with questions that cannot be answered. Somehow I want the audience to be like that character. He probably came to the theater thinking that he would be validated with a belief, and that belief would crack before his theatrical experience. The theatrical experience has a mission to reveal the twisted, hidden and show us that things are always more complicated.

The Madrid playwright who saw them and wished they could go to Asturias—the bad wind left the plane on the T-4 in Barajas—describes what the scene meant in his life and what he thought. “The fact that life is full of theater and that theater is the most lifelike art does not mean that we are unreal beings. We need theater to express ourselves,” he emphasizes, and then develops the play: “One might say that reality is what it is, but of course we have words, we have imagination, we have memory, and all of this together makes the world larger. Telling stories around the fire, why not, daydream a little, tell an anecdote and add it to another makes life more fun.”

This is evident in one of his early masterpieces, “Himmelweg”, which structures the characters through the stories told. A Red Cross representative visits a Nazi concentration camp because the organization heard it was a scene of evil. The Commander asks his victims to hide his arrogance, and they do so because this way they save time. The result is that the delegate leaves, convinced that the Jews are happy.

“The commander needs theater because he’s fed up with life, he’s a nihilist because he believes there’s little in life, there’s more in art. It’s connected with ‘The boy in the last row.’ playwright and finds the possibility of doing something transcendent in this setting from Berlin. it appears in my different parts and it also appears in the last one I wrote, ‘María Luisa’… They are the characters that life is not enough for them, and because life is not enough, they have to imagine another one”.

And this is the way Mayorga practices political theater (“Alejandro y Ana” and “Famélica” are two of the most obvious examples, but not the only one). “I always say that theater is political for at least three reasons. Theater is an assembly and therefore constitutively political. What is raised is made for scrutiny by the collective. This collective nature also makes theater political. The ‘Tongue piece by piece’ staged in the old arms factory yesterday (Monday) is mine, but it also belongs to actors Daniel Albaladejo and Clara Sanchis… So it responds to interests, wishes, wishes. the concerns of a group of people who are engaged in a dialogue with another group of people who are bystanders. And finally, theater is a political art because it is a perfect art of criticism and utopianism.

And before I get lost, clarify: “Whenever we do theatre, we do politics.. And sometimes we do it openly. When Juan Cavestany and I wrote ‘Alejandro y Ana’, I remember he spoke of ‘political emergency’ because we were trying to respond to something that was happening at that very moment. In ‘Famélica’ I dealt with the specter of communism that somehow paradoxically re-entered a multinational corporation”. And he underlines: “Whenever we are doing political theatre, we must not forget that, first of all, we must do theatre. I don’t think theater is a stage, so let me prove that I have fist-like truths, or that I am. is a place”.

And while all this is happening, it is also the “art of patience”. Mayorga, who became Mayorga, took three decades to see two of his first dramas on stage. “The theater writes because it wanted to provoke a meeting, and I’m glad that these meetings are finally happening. One of these two works is explicitly referenced in the Republic exile—it refers to the “seven good men”—and the other is in memory of the Civil War—from “The Burnt Garden.” He mentions – “Possibly if these texts had been published in the nineties, it would have sparked a different conversation than what is emerging today. I regret it”, the playwright admits that as this conversation ends, there was a conversation with the audience around and movements that were remotely unpredictable. Two workers left the hotel, leaving only unanswered questions.