Going to the theater is an almost mystical ritual: the silence of the audience, the lights off, and the magic about to begin. What happens when the show starts is a journey into the world of fiction, a humanistic journey that challenges us, makes us reflect, and moves us. But theater is also read. It is read and enjoyed. And few people know it.
When you open a theater book, you find a very dynamic, choral text with action as its main engine. It is a type of reading that awakens the imagination from the first lines and makes you travel through impossible worlds without moving from your chair. Because theater, like literature, makes us fly, makes us dream, and makes us feel that life is a little more beautiful.
Theatrical classics
Let's start at the beginning. If you want to read theater, classics are always a good option. The theater of William Shakespeare, for example, offers easy, poetic readings that recreate dreamlike worlds. Comedies like A Midsummer Night's Dream mix fantasy, desire, and love entanglements inside a magical forest and are ideal for a more fun and light reading. But great tragedies like Macbeth or Hamlet aim to portray society and show the darker side of human nature.
Let's move forward a bit in time to the 20th century, as it left us brilliant texts, such as that of the Italian Luigi Pirandello, who transformed the way of understanding theater with pieces like Six Characters in Search of an Author or The Man with the Flower in His Mouth. In his works, he analyzes the social masks we all wear every day, with poignant dialogues that function as a mirror.
On the other hand, the theater of the absurd by Samuel Beckett or Eugène Ionesco offers a quick, fun, and more philosophical reading. Beyond what it may seem at first glance, their works are easy to read because they have sharp, almost musical dialogues that criticize human incomprehension. Beckett's Waiting for Godot is one of the author's great works and introduces us to two tramps (Vladimir and Estragon) who wait by a tree for a character who never arrives. The entire play is sustained by an apparently absurd conversation that, in reality, portrays the human need to find meaning in an empty world.
If we think of the great classics of literature, we must also talk about the literature of the Golden Age. And it is that the theater produced in the 16th century is full of action, sword duels, love entanglements, picaresque, and a dizzying rhythm. Lope de Vega was the great playwright of the era because he knew exactly what the audience wanted: rhythm and strong emotions. In works like La dama boba or El perro del hortelano, the reading flows thanks to witty dialogues, full of mischief and romantic strategies. But, for a more intense and social reading, Fuenteovejuna is the author's great title: the revolt of an entire village against the abuse of power.
Calderón de la Barca opted for a more existential and profound theater. His great work, La vida es sueño, is the story of Prince Segismundo who, locked in a tower, challenges us with universal questions (what is reality and what is fiction?). But Calderón also wrote comedies of entanglement like La dama duende, where he demonstrates a very refined technique and a rhythm that helps keep the reader hooked until the last page.
In Catalonia, we also have a great theatrical tradition from authors like Àngel Guimerà, the master of tension. In Terra baixa, we find a proposal that is almost a psychological and social thriller where the tension keeps growing until the famous ending "I have killed the wolf!". And in Mar i cel, Guimerà raises the action aboard a pirate ship where a cultural conflict erupts between Saïd and Blanca.
But, apart from Guimerà, in Catalan theater we also find Santiago Rusiñol who brings a more agile, ironic, and fun style to our literature. L'alegria que passa is his masterpiece, as well as L'auca del senyor Esteve. Nor can we forget Josep Maria de Sagarra, the author who has an absolute mastery of the language; works like El cafè de la Marina or La Rambla de les floristes present lively, popular, and rhythmic dialogues.
And women playwrights? They were there too! Due to the political and social circumstances of the time, female dramaturgy was minor: but it existed. This is the case of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican writer who wrote some of the most brilliant comedies in Spanish, while Lope and Calderón triumphed on the peninsula. Her masterpiece, Los empeños de una casa, is a comedy of entanglements and dialogues that, unlike her contemporaries, made the protagonists of the works intelligent and independent women (instead of being represented as objects of desire or honor, which was the typical character of the Golden Age).
In Catalonia, we also had a brilliant woman writer and playwright, although she had to hide under a man's pseudonym. Yes: we are talking about Caterina Albert (Víctor Català), a key figure of the early 20th century who wrote La infanticida, a theatrical monologue that talks about social pressure and motherhood. The author of Solitud presented this text at the Olot Literary Contest in 1898 and, due to the theme dealt with in the text, it was discovered that a woman was hiding under the name of Català. The scandal was enormous.
Reading current Catalan dramaturgy
We move away from the classics and look at the present because the Catalan theatrical scene is experiencing one of its sweetest and most interesting moments. Today we find a type of dramatic writing that talks about the great dilemmas of the 21st century such as identity, historical memory, imperialism, or social distancing.
Jordi Galceran has written great successes such as El mètode Grönholm, a piece that works equally well on stage as on paper, thanks to its poignant dialogues, constant plot twists, and black humor. The same mechanism is repeated in El crèdit or Burundanga, two comedies that have triumphed on the billboard and whose reading is more than recommended.
Sergi Belbel is another of the great names in current dramaturgy with works such as Després de la pluja or Carícies. Reading Belbel is appreciating the precision of the word: every answer and every silence advance the action. For his part, Josep Maria Miró has also signed El principi d'Arquimedes, a masterful piece about suspicion, fear, and social networks.
Within Catalan female authorship, Clàudia Cedó stands out, having signed very delicate and poetic pieces such as Una gossa en un descampat or Els àngels no tenen fills, where the experience of motherhood and vulnerability are treated with great empathy. In this same vein of human relationships, Marta Buchaca is a writer who talks about the complexity of bonds in Litus (also adapted to cinema) or about gender violence in Només una vegada.
Llàtzer Garcia is one of the most intimate and reflective voices when it comes to talking about human vulnerability. In works like La pols and Sota la ciutat, the author places us in environments charged with everyday realism to address themes such as generational frustration and family rifts. For his part, Joan Yago (playwright of the company La Calòrica) is, today, one of the most prominent voices in contemporary political and social satire. Works like Fairfly or De què parlem mentre no parlem de tota aquesta merda are proposals full of black humor and dialogues that read at a frantic pace.
We cannot stop talking about a very active playwright on the theatrical billboard in recent years: Victoria Szpunberg. The author writes with a gaze full of irony, social criticism, and poetry, to talk about the contradictions of the contemporary world. On the other hand, Helena Tornero uses theater as a vehicle for memory and political reflection in works such as No parlis amb estranys or the acclaimed Tu em vas prometre una històra d'amor, premiered at Sala Beckett.
But there are also texts by Catalan authors who have crossed borders and screens: this is the case of Guillem Clua. His work Smiley went from theatrical venues to becoming a Netflix series. Years later, at the Aquitània Teatre, he premiered the second part of the play, Smiley, després de l'amor, which also achieved great success with both audience and critics and was re-premiered at La Villarroel.
And Catalan dramaturgy cannot be understood without Lluïsa Cunillé. We are facing the first playwright to win the National Prize for Dramatic Literature in 2010 for her work Aquel aire infinito. Within her bibliography, we find such emblematic titles as Barcelona, mapa d'ombres, El bordell or I la pluja va caure tota la nit. Cunillé makes very realistic portraits of loneliness in cities, memory, the passage of time, and the wounds of recent history.
Discover the most international theatrical voices
Beyond our borders, we also find great theatrical proposals that are ideal to discover through the pleasure of reading. A very clear case is that of Yasmina Reza, the author of the multi-award-winning Art or God of Carnage, texts that can be read in one sitting, thanks to their agile rhythm, their irony, and their constant action.
For a high-impact and reflective reading experience, nothing better than approaching the texts of Wajdi Mouawad, a Canadian writer of Lebanese origin known for his tetralogy titled The Blood of Promises, and headed by Incendies, one of the great works of contemporary dramaturgy. This work was carried out between 1997 and 2009, years in which Mouawad wrote Littoral, Incendies, Forests and Heavens, a theatrical saga that talks about memory, wars, family traumas and, above all, human tragedy. His works, widely performed in Catalonia by La Perla 29, are written with a poetic prose full of beauty and realism.
The 20th-century American theater must also be read. It is a type of agile and dynamic proposal that portrays family conflicts and characters who, today, have become unforgettable. Let's start with the great classic: Tennessee Williams. The successful author of A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof remains one of the most read authors in schools and institutes in the United States, theatrical pieces that are read as if they were novels.
Arthur Miller is another of the great voices of American dramaturgy. In works such as Death of a Salesman or The Crucible, Miller constructs moral and political thrillers, with a rhythm so well worked that it does not let the reader breathe until the last page.
If we look at German theater, we must talk about Bertolt Brecht. With his "epic theater", Brecht did not want the reader to merely be moved from the armchair, but also to think and get involved in the theatrical experience. Works such as The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), Mother Courage and Her Children or The Good Person of Szechwan use songs, direct dialogues and situations full of comedy that make reading fluid and simple.
British dramaturgy is also one of the most prominent for its proposal of black humor and social criticism. In this sense, Harold Pinter is one of its greatest representatives. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, his style is full of tension, twists, and surprises. Some of his most well-known works are The Homecoming or Betrayal, where dialogues seem everyday, but each sentence hides a power struggle.
Caryl Churchill is a British author who is considered one of the most important and innovative playwrights of recent decades. Among her theatrical production, Top Girls or Far Away stand out, works that use surreal aesthetics and fragmented structures to talk about feminism, capitalism, and the future. Her writing is vivid, full of voices and dynamism.
Nor can we stop talking about Sarah Kane, a British playwright who was a key figure in the In-Yer-Face phenomenon of the 90s. Kane revolutionized the scene with works like Blasted or 4.48 Psychosis. Her texts are brief, but they have a great poetic intensity that makes reading them a true pleasure.
Theater books are sold in theaters
Did you know that in some theaters in Barcelona you can buy books? Spaces like Sala Beckett, the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya or the Teatre Lliure have for sale the texts of the plays they are programming or have already programmed in the venue. In this way, the texts performed on stage continue to have life after the show and readers can access their stories, even if the lights have gone out.
In addition, the prices of these copies are very affordable and you can pick them up at the theater's box office. The TNC has its own line of editions in collaboration with publishers such as Arola, the Teatre Lliure regularly publishes the texts of its productions thanks to its collaboration with the publisher Comanegra, and the Sala Beckett promotes the publication of contemporary Catalan dramaturgy in its collection Biblioteca Sala Beckett.
This summer, instead of reading novels on the beach, let's read theater! A type of reading that helps us rediscover the value of the naked word, without intermediaries, without special effects and without the need to buy a ticket. Because theater is also read.