"Hug me until I fall asleep" or the story of an awakening

Marcel goes to high school. A few days earlier, at a party, he met Teo. Shortly after, upon leaving high school, Teo is there, waiting for him. Clara, Marcel's best friend, is clear about it.

"I think he's here for you."

Marcel, with Teo, discovers himself, discovers love, discovers sex, discovers abuse…

"They packed their bags and disappeared."

Marcel rethinks everything he has lived, puts it in order, exposes it, understands it.

"Marcel, do you promise me we'll always be friends?"

A story about life

But it is not just the story of the discovery of love, of sexuality… it is also the story of life. Life is what happens while we are doing other things (as John Lennon used to say). Because Marcel lives his life, and years pass… and, one day, he realizes that 10 years have passed and that what he had lived is now just the past. An old memory.

The text by Guillem Coromina knows how to explain in brief episodes a story that begins in adolescence and ends years later. The direction by Guillem Sánchez García is very efficient. He knows how to set the right pace, the pauses (very necessary) are very well placed. It is not a monotonous monologue, it has many inflections.

And Roc Bernardí interprets Marcel very well. A boy who one day was a teenager full of fears and insecurities and now looks back, trying to put in order what he has lived to understand what he is living now.

The stage is almost empty. Roc Bernardí introduces elements from the past that, in the present, disappear. A good idea that clearly marks the passage of time. The use of the microphone for dialogues makes the narrative and the narrated situations be on different levels.

Abraça'm fins que m'adormi, at Sala Beckett, if it were a movie, it could be a movie that tells us about teenagers discovering themselves. But it is not a movie. It is theater. And it is alive. It is not a cold frame that passes and is forgotten. It is a tender, intense production and, at times, with an underlying violence that can frighten us. A good opportunity to see a very beautiful interpretation.